Challenges of Multicloud Adoption and Platform Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction

In a multi-cloud world, businesses face significant challenges in platform engineering and multicloud adoption. This comprehensive guide explores the complexities and offers valuable insights for navigating this landscape.

Platform Thinking in a Multicloud World

• The speaker, B Brunard, is a Principal Technologist at VMware, covering all the technologies. He expresses excitement about being back at the DevOp stage and acknowledges the challenges of multicloud in the global economy.

• Multicloud is expected to be the dominant business model for the next 20 years, as organizations seek ways to innovate in a digital-first economy. However, managing multiple clouds presents challenges such as security, privacy, infrastructure inconsistency, and skills gap.

• The speaker identifies three phases in the cloud journey: cloud first, cloud chaos, and being cloud smart. Many organizations are struggling with the complexity of migrating applications and managing multicloud environments.

• The emergence of AI applications is seen as the next wave of technological innovation. Large language models and generative AI are becoming increasingly accessible and applicable across various business functions. However, there are concerns about privacy and data security in leveraging AI capabilities at scale.

Private AI and VMware’s Approach to Machine Learning

• VMware emphasizes the importance of complete access to ML models in a multi-cloud or public cloud scenario for effective AI implementation.

• The Vmy AI Labs team focuses on private AI, which strikes a balance between business gains from AI and the organization’s privacy and compliance needs.

• VMware has built a reference architecture for VMware Private AI, leveraging their core technologies around Cloud Foundation.

• The joint offering with AWS, Google, Azure, Oracle, IBM, and 4,000 service providers worldwide allows for deploying a private cloud, hybrid cloud, or renting VMware Cloud Foundation as a service.

• Integration capabilities include learning VMS, vector databases, scaling GPUs, and collaborating with open-source ecosystems, such as Hugging Face, to bring AI models and sharing platforms to developers.

• A joint solution with Nvidia, built on Cloud Foundation, DEAC, and Nvidia AI Enterprise, aims to make AI accessible to more organizations globally, irrespective of data location.

• VMware is focused on providing a platform that enhances developer productivity, improves security, and accelerates application delivery, addressing challenges such as multi-cloud exposure, security breaches, Kubernetes scaling, and day two operation optimization.

Challenges of Multicloud Adoption and Platform Engineering

• World-class organizations release thousands of updates per year, but multicloud adoption is increasing complexity for software development teams.

• Challenges include dealing with containers, Kubernetes run times, cost optimization, secure supply chains for open source images, and managing runtime security.

• Platform engineering teams need to focus on developing, operating, and optimizing software components, including OSS packages, CI/CD, and access control, with a common control plane and federated data to drive outcomes.

• Platform engineering should treat the platform as a product, focusing on adoption, training, enabling easy onboarding, integrating third parties, and establishing a roadmap and capacity planning function.

• The ultimate goal is to find an automated path to production, allowing development teams to focus on building applications without being burdened by platform management complexities.

Exploring VMware’s Tanzu Brand and Application Platform

• VMware’s Tanzu brand encompasses the focus on software development, operations, and optimization.

• The Tanzu Application Platform includes a developer portal, software supply chains, Kubernetes operations, and features like predefined application accelerators and API catalog.

• The Tanzu Application Engine assists in defining a space for application configurations, including autoscaling and upgrades.

• Tanzu Intelligent Services provide features like Cloud health and other components for ease of use, especially in the optimized phase.

• Developers can leverage Tanzu’s capabilities to streamline the process of building and deploying applications, as demonstrated through the example of Scott, a developer working on an existing application.

Tanzu Application Platform: Empowering Development and Platform Engineering

• The Tanzu Application Platform aims to ease the pain for development teams by providing building blocks such as curated open source packages, built-in security, and application accelerators. The platform helps in finding a golden path to production, embodying the vision of Tanzu Application Platform.

• The Tanzu Application Engine, a component inside the Tanzu Application Platform, allows platform teams to focus on building a custom application runtime for developers, covering aspects such as cost, performance, business insights, and security findings.

• Shauna, a key figure, has created specific application spaces, like the Acme prot space and Acme Dev space, customized for Scott’s environment. These spaces offer attributes related to encryption security and are tailored to the respective application space.

• The platform also provides capabilities for deployment, such as enabling mtls, high availability, autoscaling, and ensuring compliance with standards like PCI DSS. Additionally, it offers automated support for upgrading Kubernetes versions, ensuring minimal disruption to the applications.

• The intelligent assist capability uses generative AI and large language models to provide natural language interface, empowering users to ask questions and receive feedback. It helps in identifying applications with cost, security, and policy violations, offering recommendations for optimization and resizing to enhance efficiency.

• VMware’s approach with the Tanzu portfolio focuses on holistic practices, supporting open-source tools, and providing a centralized platform for accelerated application delivery across clouds. It aims to drive software agility by enabling quick development, operation, and optimization at scale.

Conclusion

Navigating the challenges of multicloud adoption and platform engineering is crucial for businesses in the digital-first economy. By understanding the complexities and leveraging best practices, organizations can effectively manage multi-cloud environments and drive innovation.

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