VMware's cloud journey has cut costs, speeded time-to-market

VMware's IT infrastructure, in numbers.

Avon Puri, VP Business IT at VMware, has shared the challenges of VMware's own IT transformation journey at the VMware CIO Leadership Forum 2017 in Singapore.

The company's main challenge was managing change. "There are more projects and there are more complex projects, and our budget is always going down," Puri said.

VMware was faced with three main challenges:

• Constant demand to do more with less and also to do it fast
• Security and privacy continue to be top of mind, and have grown in importance. It is no longer about securing the perimeter alone. "Security has to be embedded as a company moves towards more hybrid cloud architecture and multiple cloud architecture," Puri said.
• Employees demand a consumer experience at work. "It starts to become more and more complicated. If you put corporate data on (personal devices) you must have the ability to manage it, the ability to delete it when the person leaves the company," Puri observed.

VMware decided to consolidate its different private clouds, set up to meet specific demands, onto a single private cloud. Processes were speeded up with DevOps and continuous agile delivery.

"One cloud is very efficient and cost effective. It is one resource for the enterprise," Puri said.

As VMware moved onto an internal cloud, costs went down.

The single cloud supports multiple lines of business and multiple service level agreements (SLAs), three nines availability for development and testing, for instance, and four nines for customer-facing apps, and hands-on labs for training.

The biggest lesson, Puri said, is that "you can have all the infrastructure but it is a lot more than setting up the platform and architecture. DevOps is a technology, people and process journey.

"To become an agile organisation developers must be able to control the infrastructure directly and manage it automatically."

A lot of change management was required to migrate to the faster delivery model required by agile development methodologies, Puri explained. The traditional method for software development is to test the code well before putting it into production, whereas the agile method goes for incremental improvements.

VMware is actively working on a move to a cloud-native architecture, which will enhance developer productivity and automation, Puri revealed. Part of the migration process involves rearchitecting legacy infrastructure such as the main website, for which functionalities are currently interconnected. Changing one functionality means retesting the whole site to make sure that nothing else has changed. Going cloud-native will mean being able to change one functionality without affecting anything else.



Takeaways from the journey to date:

• Moving to the cloud has provided an on-demand infrastructure which is a significant advantage.
• Creating a public cloud experience on a private cloud can save money. 
• Realising the benefits of an agile methodology means rearchitecting monolithic applications
• Employees deserve consumer-like experiences.
• Workspace management platforms can resolve the conflicts between user experience and security requirements
• Security must be planned from the ground up. 

Interested?

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posted from Bloggeroid