Fotolia
Future of VMware depends on its cloud-native strategy
In this week's SDN blog post roundup, an expert assesses the future of VMware, and other bloggers take us to the Kubernetes and IETF conferences.
Blogger and IT consultant Keith Townsend thinks the future of VMware rides on the company's "Cloud-Native" strategy, which in turn revolves around its software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies -- from VSAN to NSX to vRA.
In a recent blog post, Townsend recaps how VMware's early success was built on server virtualization using vSphere. In Townsend's view, however, competition from Amazon Web Services (AWS) has left VMware with a small window to capitalize on its existing market share and meet evolving customer demands.
Townsend writes that VMware's core enterprise customers will need to maintain thousands of legacy applications while also integrating new cloud-native applications. VMware hopes to convince them to continue using vSphere for legacy apps, while turning to related tools -- such as vSphere Integrated Containers or vSphere Integrated OpenStack -- for cloud apps. He writes that the company aims to make its SDDC approach the answer to every cloud-native question.
Read more of Townsend's thoughts on the future of VMware.
Diverse approaches to container networking
Dan Conde, an analyst with ESG Global, based in Milford, Mass., attended Kubecon, the Kubernetes conference in San Francisco, noting his observations in a recent blog post.
Conde writes that the "eye of the beholder" determines the appropriate approach to Kubernetes, with perspective dictating design. Juniper and Metaswitch, for example, have tended to adopt a network-centric view of Kubernetes, using BGP to create a scalable foundation.
By contrast, SignalFX Inc. -- which caters to app managers -- takes more of an app-centric view, while CoreOS adopts a developer-oriented position using an array of plug-ins.
According to Conde, another big takeaway from the conference is that CoreOS is striving to make network plug-ins function across different container engines. The system works with a range of networking approaches, from MAC VLANs to new SDN approaches such as Weave.
"I think this reflects the fact that in this varied container world, one cannot force a single way to do networking, so it's better to plug in to different underlying network abstractions," writes Conde.
Learn more about Conde's thoughts on Kubecon.
Recapping IETF Yokohama
Packet Pushers blogger Russ White recently attended the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference in Yokohama, Japan, where he participated in several meetings on network functions virtualization (NFV).
White reports that attendees at one such presentation discussed how to implement service-specific policies in an NFV environment. Another session involved an IETF draft on how DevOps principles can help achieve successful NFV deployments.
Read more of White's report on IETF.
