When looking at any industry, businesses are highly dependent on the speed at which they can develop and deploy their software and services. Traditional methods of software deployment that those businesses have been used to so far are not fast enough to cope with that cadence. Efficiency of execution is also of extreme importance these days to keep the costs down. That requires the ability to scale up or down on demand and do that on the platform of their choice.
Both these requirements have brought about the new way of developing and operating business systems which is widely known as “Digital Transformation”. It is a topic that is not well understood and companies are looking for guidance as to how to start their digital transformation journey.
Having a “Cloud First” strategy and adopting development processes that follow agile development methodologies is key to digital transformation. Adopting a cloud first strategy doesn’t necessarily mean the application must live in a cloud environment; rather it should be architected with portability in mind, making it platform agnostic so that it can run on whichever platform suits the application the best.
Containerisation of applications is what makes that portability possible by encapsulating those workloads and in recent times, Kubernetes has become the orchestration management platform of choice. More and more organisations are now adopting these mechanisms to transform their application landscapes. However, that will ultimately mean more and more businesses having a “hybrid” cloud strategy going forward. That reality brings new challenges for operations who now have to train themselves to manage, monitor and secure multiple platforms.
How great is it that VMware is thinking about those challenges already and announced Project Pacific to integrate Kubernetes into the platform and Project Tanzu to manage it all. That’s very exciting for me as a techie at heart but also to my customers who are looking for a unified control plane to manage multiple platforms that run their applications.
