One of the highlights of TFD19 was the visit at VMware’s Palo Alto HQ to hear the latest from the Cloud Management Business Unit. The day was split in two, with the first half focused on the latest advancements of vRealize Operations Manager (a.k.a. vROps) and the last part completely dedicated to Cloud Automation Services (CAS).

Both sessions were demo-heavy and focused more around showing the real capabilities of the products rather than killing the audience with endless PowerPoint decks. John Dias and Cody De Arkland did a terrific  job in presenting their respective solution, I recommend you to visit the TechField Day website and watch the videos: seeing is believing.

Both topics were equally interesting. From my point of view and being a long time vROps user, John’s presentation was useful for taking notes of the “what’s new” features to be tested soon back at work. After an exhausting TFD week, I saved what was left of my energies to focus on CAS. Below are some of my thoughts on it.

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I came across Aviatrix for the first time a few months ago, while I was knee-deep in the preparation of AWS Associate Exams and at the same time researching for a cloud migration project. AWS networking was a major topic of the exams and also an important research area for my assignment at work. It was very clear to me from the very beginning that Cloud Networking is inherently different from traditional networking. Of course, they share the very same foundations but designing and managing networks in any Public Cloud is a very different business than doing the same in your Data Center. In the Cloud there are no routers or switches you can log into, there are no console cables nor SFP connectors, but you have VPCs that you can literally spin up with a few lines of code with all their bells and whistles (including security policies for the workloads they contain).

This implies a few considerations. First and foremost, the expectations of Cloud Engineers are very different from those of Network Engineers: Cloud Engineers can set up VPCs in minutes but they can be easily frustrated by their on-prem Network counterparts lagging weeks behind to provide VPN connectivity and BGP route distribution to the Data Center. Then there is the skills gap to be filled: Cloud Engineering Teams are usually small and manned by all-round technologists rather than specialists, very often there is no Network Guru in Cloud Teams capable of citing RFCs by memory, so there is a need to keep things simple, yet they must work “as they should”. Finally, in Public Clouds is very easy to lose control and become victims of the VPC sprawl; managing Cloud Networking at scale is probably the biggest challenges of all.

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ClearSky is a Boston-based startup founded in 2014 by industry veterans Lazarus Vekiarides and Ellen Rubin; ClearSky comes with a unique proposition, which – if successful – might revolutionize the way primary storage is consumed. I introduced ClearSky in my previous TFD14 preview article where I described their solution; the objective is to reduce drastically the Data Center footprint of traditional primary storage by shifting it to the Cloud while at the same time simplifying DR operations and ensuring accessibility of data from any location. This outcome seemed to be impossible to achieve due to the strict latency requirements that primary storage inherently carries, but ClearSky has found an elegant and effective solution to this conundrum. However, there is one caveat here and it will be evident in the following paragraph.

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During this edition of VMworld Europe I followed only a few sessions, included two focusing on the new vCloud Hybrid Service directly offered by VMware, one presented by Massimo Re Ferre’ and another one by Chris Colotti and David Hill on “How to build a Hybrid Cloud in less than a day”.

In this post I will present Massimo’s session: PHC5070 – vCloud Hybrid Service: Architecture and Consumption Principles. This session was the first of a five part series, completely focused on vCHS.

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