How Can You Respond To Customer Needs And Get Ideas Into Market Faster? Evolve Your Abstractions

Over a decade ago, Marc Andreesen appropriately stated, “software is eating the world.”¹ Today, software looks quite a bit different. Not only are we consuming software over the Internet from cloud service providers like Salesforce, AWS, and of course VMware, but most global enterprises now develop their own using cloud-native applications. Today, we might argue that cloud software is eating the world, or perhaps feeding it.

The pandemic sent this development trend into overdrive, making it an absolute necessity to deliver customer outcomes from remote locations, often through software.

Applications our customers have built—like those that connect childcare to parents in need, or use AI to approve loans without a customer ever entering a bank—helped us all stay afloat over the past few years. Those were necessary advancements developed in urgency, but the skills and technologies we picked up along the way will persist far beyond masks and social distancing.

^{Watch the VMware Multi-Cloud Briefing for industry, partner, and customer perspectives on cross-cloud abstraction.}

Multi-Cloud and the Role of Abstraction

It’s amazing what our customers have delivered through software in the cloud. What we see now is a near-ubiquity on two fronts:

• 95% of new applications are being developed with containers², and Kubernetes is orchestrating most of the underlying infrastructure for these apps
• 75% of organizations have a multi-cloud architecture, with two or more public clouds for their applications

This is a familiar evolution and a recurring challenge in IT. Remember when we had multiple physical services, storage arrays, and networking devices operating independently in the data center? That complexity ushered in a layer of abstraction—virtualization—that allowed us to make all of those components work together as one.

As virtualization advanced, adding automation and on-demand, self-service access to infrastructure resources, the door opened to create what we know now as IaaS and the era of hyperscale cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

With most organizations now using multiple cloud providers for their infrastructure, we’re back to a similar pattern of complexity. For developers, each cloud provider has unique interfaces and APIs that add toil and slow the pace of their releases. Operators face a similar challenge, with every additional cloud increasing the complexity of their architecture, fragmenting security, performance optimization, and cost management.

So this multi-cloud architecture has the best of every cloud, but once again, it’s complex.

Solving Multi-Cloud Complexity for Greater Agility and Speed

We’re at the tipping point of abstraction, and solutions to this complexity are starting to arise. Driving this is that developers don’t want to think about their underlying infrastructure, either at the container level or the cloud on which they run. At the same time, operators want consistent visibility over deployments, spend, and security configurations for every cloud.

Meeting these needs requires software interfaces that operate across clouds, abstracting away the complexity of the underlying multi-cloud infrastructure. At VMware, we call this layer of abstraction cross-cloud, as do some of our industry partners, like Snowflake³.

For example, one of our Cross-Cloud services, VMware Tanzu, serves both developers and operators in modern app development in the cloud. Developers can check in their code without ever touching the underlying infrastructure, which has been decoupled from their development tools and templates. Operators then deploy with their own cloud-agnostic abstraction above multi-cloud. With Tanzu, they can manage, monitor, and secure Kubernetes clusters in the same way, for any cloud.

“Really, the best part about this is that my development team doesn’t really know any difference between going to OpenStack and AWS. The developer experience is almost exactly the same.” – Greg Meyer, Director and Distinguished Engineer at Cerner

With these abstractions, developers move faster, addressing customer needs and bringing new ideas to life that drive your organization’s growth. And you can run cloud infrastructure at a sustainable, continuously optimized cost.

Choosing one cloud provider or another no longer needs to introduce added complexity for IT. Instead, you can focus on the ideas that improve your customer experience and drive growth, built on any cloud you choose. By abstracting away the complexity of multi-cloud, you can reach a new level of business agility.

To learn more, jump over to our Multi-Cloud Briefing, where I discuss this concept with industry experts and one of our great customers.