During the Microsoft Management Summit last month, I had an interesting chat with Rakesh Malhotra who is the VP product of Apprenda. It made me to think more about two important technologies: virtualization and PaaS. As we know, virtualization is almost a must for IaaS. Will it be the same case for PaaS?
Pure PaaS or PaaS over IaaS
The software-defined networking is the new buzzword for network centralization, which is also known as OpenFlow or network virtualization. The idea is to centralize the control to a server (or a cluster of servers) called controller.
With the acquisition of Nicira by VMware, the software-defined networking has caught many eyeballs from the community. From there, VMware extended it to a new vision called software-defined datacenter which includes three elements of computing: compute, network, and storage.
After server virtualization took off, virtualization became a buzzword which made it easy to get attention from market, and for startup companies, to get funding. Therefore you’ve seen many technologies claiming it’s * virtualization mostly for marketing purpose. Network virtualization is such a case. The even newer term for it is called software defined network, or simply SDN.
It’s Centralization, Really!
I flew to Vegas this week for Microsoft Management Summit 2013, which happens to be in the same hotel (Mandalay Bay) as VMware Partner Exchange one and half months ago. The organizations and activities of both conferences are pretty similar – keynotes, breakout sessions, hands on labs (HOL). It’s pretty exciting to learn new technologies and meet new people.
Hands On Labs
While reading Michael White’s newsletter (a weekly digest regarding VMware technology that I find very useful and read regularly) a while back, I came to know a small emulator tool for SDN called MiniNet (http://mininet.github.com/). I got a little time to read and play with it over the weekend and though it’s worthwhile to share my experience here.
Download the Virtual Machine
In my last post, I introduced how to run a very simple HelloWorld script with Puppet 3.1.0 on CentOS 6.3. Although it shows how Puppet works, it’s not really how Puppet is used in real world. To get the most out of Puppet, you want to run the client/server mode where you have a master and many agents.
Part 1: Install Puppet server
Puppet is a very well-known configuration management tool that has been adopted by many enterprises and service providers. VMware recently invested $30M in Puppet Labs, the company behind it. It’s clear that VMware needs such a tool if it wants to grow in data center space.
I actually got a book from last year’s PuppetConf in San Francisco and browsed through it on my flights. As with any other technology, reading it does not mean getting it. To get my hands dirty, I played with it in my home lab last week.
Last week VMware formally announced that it would form a virtual team with EMC to take cloud service and middleware market. There was a rumor about it the week early which turned out to be mostly true. If you are in IT industry nowadays, you simply cannot under-estimate the power of rumors. I think most of the VMware and EMC employees might hear the rumor before hearing it from their management teams. 
Last week I took a two day boot camp on OpenStack, which is increasingly popular these days. The project was initially created at Rackspace in answering Amazon Web Services, and open sourced to the community.
Not only service providers and software vendors showed interests in the project, but also hardware vendors tried to pre-install OpenStack as one of key differentiators (inside most, if not all, of hardware boxes are Intel therefore not much difference).
After VMware touting out the new term “software defined data center,” I suddenly saw many vendors claiming they support software defined data center at VMworld. Days ago I read a news about Joe Tucci, the CEO of VMware’s parent company EMC, explaining what “software defined data center” is.
At first sight, these two technologies are totally different and you won’t talk about them together. But looking closely at the philosophies behind them, I find they are surprisingly similar and I hope you would agree with me after reading through this article.
A Quick Overview
Before getting into the detailed analysis, let’s take a quick look at the concepts and histories of both technologies.
During the breaks of my vacation last week, I tried the Technology Preview for the Apache Hadoop-based Service on Windows Azure. The service is not yet publicly available and requiring Microsoft approval. Here is the link that I used to file my application. It took several days for me to get the email with invitation code. Sorry that I cannot include the code here.
About two weeks ago, CRN published an article about VMware Zephyr project. According to the article, VMware plans to launch a public IaaS cloud to compete with Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and more directly with existing VMware vCloud service providers. The reason for the move is “because none of its service provider partners are moving fast enough. Look at the adoption rate of vCloud Director with service providers — it is non-existent.”
In my last article, I analyzed the real motivation behind the VMware’s recent intention to acquire Nicira. In this article, I am going to review VMware’s past strategies and predict its long term strategies. In short, VMware’s past growth strategy is “vertical,” and its future growth strategy should be “horizontal.”
Past Strategy Review
VMware’s acquisition of Nicira posted a big risk on Cisco’s future control of networking market. The risk was in fact there from day one of VMware ESX with virtual switches and then distributed virtual switches, which reduces the need for customers to buy physical geeks from Cisco because virtual machines use “free” virtual ports. For the inter-physical server communication, customers still need Cisco and other vendors even though the volume is not as high as otherwise. That is why Cisco quickly came up with its own distributed virtual switch Nexus 1000v to stay relevant in the virtualization market.
On this past Monday VMware announced to buy Nicira for $1.26 billion. Congratulations to many of my former VMware colleagues who joined Nicira and will return back to VMware soon.
Overall this deal aligns well with VMware’s newly found vision on software defined data center. You must have read many of similar explanations and comments from various sources including this one from VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and this one by Nicira cofounder and CTO Martin Casado.
BusinessWeek recently published an article “In Silicon Valley, Hardware is Hot Again.” Almost all big names started to sell hardware now, Microsoft, Google, and Apple of course. Apple’s stellar success in iPhone and iPad disrupted the conventional wisdom that software is higher in margin compared to hardware. Also, Apple’s hardware and software combined devices posts a real risk for Microsoft and Google. To be exact, the hardware in the article title should really be software bundled hardware. That is why Google and Microsoft had to get into hardware business competing directly against Apple.
Many of us have already heard of the term “software stack.” It shows the software layers in boxes stacking up on each other, all the way from operating system, to middleware, and to applications. When these layers are offered as services, we have IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service), PaaS (Platform As A Service), and SaaS (Software As A Service) respectively for so called cloud service stack. These two stacks are essentially similar if not the same.
Once upon a time, there was a famous vision – “The network is the computer.” If you have been with ITindustry long enough, you would know what the company was behind the vision. Inspired the vision for computer, I am inventing yet another one for cloud – “The data is the cloud.”
As a software professional using Java since its very beginning, I have been following the case regarding Google’s using Java APIs in its Android OS. I don’t want to repeat what has happened so far because you can find these updates by searching the Internet. All I want to say is that the case is pretty educational not only on the technology itself but also on the legal side like patents, copyright.
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