VMware has done a lot of very smart things recently, but what’s perhaps the biggest thing they’ve done—the Pivotal acquisition that just closed—may or may not be among them. If it is, then VMware is positioned to be a killer player in the cloud market in 2020, and if it’s not, then VMware is going to suffer what could be a significant loss of momentum. So, which will it be?
Pivotal was, like VMware, a kind of Child of Dell, an independent organization in a general business sense, but still a piece of the Dell empire. The company did an IPO in 2018 but it seemed that as it did, it was losing momentum. VMware bought it after a major earnings shortfall reported in June. If the decision was made just to bail out a fellow Dell-ecosystem player, it was a bad one. The Street, and according to sales reports, the market, were giving up on Pivotal. We have to start our exploration with why that was the case.
Pivotal was, in effect, the commercial conduit for Cloud Foundry, one of the cloud market’s first implementation of a cloud-native platform-as-a-service. This sort of PaaS is important for several reasons. First, it presents a complete solution to cloud development and deployment, one that doesn’t have to be integrated from a bunch of open-source moving parts by the enterprises who propose to use it. Second, it enforces a cloud-native application model that assures cloud benefits like resilience and scalability are actually delivered. Many enterprise cloud applications are just transplants of monolithic applications to IaaS. All this was good stuff, of course.
Except for the onrushing Kubernetes ecosystem avalanche. Pivotal had its own orchestration approach, but it recognized eventually that it could never hope to fend off Kubernetes, so it moved to adopt it. That was a good move, but almost surely one taken too late, given Kubernetes’ publicity. But timing notwithstanding, what Pivotal didn’t do was respond to the fact that the “Kubernetes ecosystem” was in fact an evolving cloud-native PaaS competitor.
Even if nobody was productizing a complete Kubernetes ecosystem, the publicity that the concept generated in 2019 was more than enough to raise the visibility of the ecosystem as a solid cloud-native option, one with seemingly a lot more support and visibility than Cloud Foundry and Pivotal. But others were productizing Kubernetes ecosystems, including Google (Anthos), IBM (Kabanero), and even VMware (Tanzu). I think that the explosion of ecosystemic solutions to cloud-native applications, built around Kubernetes and seeming to sweep the market, was the big factor in Pivotal’s sales slump last summer.
So where does this leave VMware? They just bought something that their own Kubernetes-centric strategy seems to have helped kick out of the game. Cloud Foundry still exists as an open-source foundation, but if it couldn’t win with commercial sponsorship (Pivotal supplied most of the resources to the project), can it even survive without it? That means VMware has to decide fairly quickly whether to continue to fund/support Cloud Foundry, or to let it slip into a pure open-source strategy with no real backers. That’s their make-or-break decision, I think.
Pivotal will be folded into VMware’s new Modern Applications Platform BU, where it joins the current VMware cloud-native work. VMware’s press release has a summary of their vision: “Pivotal’s offerings will be core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate. The combination of Pivotal’s developer-centric offerings with VMware’s upstream Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management tools will deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications. VMware is able to offer product building blocks and integrated solutions that are tested and proven with technical expertise that customers need to accelerate software delivery across data center, cloud and edge environments.” This sets out what VMware intends to do, or at least will try to do.
Being “core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio” isn’t the same as being the core. The rest of the quote frames Pivotal as being a cloud-native development platform that’s integrated with VMware’s Kubernetes framework, and through it to vSphere (via Project Pacific). It becomes a part of the Tanzu ecosystem, bringing with it the customer base that Pivotal/Cloud Foundry had. The trick for VMware is to ensure that Cloud Foundry contributes a couple of legs to the dog, but doesn’t become the dog wagging the Tanzu tail.
Pivotal sunk because of Kubernetes ecosystem competition, so it seems to me that VMware has to make Pivotal part of the Kubernetes ecosystem, when in the past it promoted itself as a whole different cloud-native PaaS pathway. Obviously, VMware had planned to field a Kubernetes ecosystem, and so what it really needs to do is to decompose Cloud Foundry and Pivotal’s contribution and then reframe them in pure Tanzu terms. Fortunately, it has some assets in fulfilling this mission.
The biggest asset is that Cloud Foundry is a PaaS, which means that it’s a development framework that consists of a set of APIs that applications then bind with to gain cloud-native stature. What goes on under the covers is of less concern to current Cloud Foundry users, as long as it preserves their applications and aligns the result (Tanzu) with the Kubernetes onrush. That shouldn’t be too difficult for VMware to do, as long as it protects its flanks.
Which are Pivotal people and their Cloud-Foundry-centric mindset. Pivotal workers have been worried about layoffs; in November, they signed an open letter opposing VMware’s likely move to lay off the people in Pivotal’s Workplace Operations and some other units. VMware needs to worry about whether the Pivotal people they keep will themselves keep hold of the mindset that led to the June sales shortfall. They need Pivotal people to become Tanzu-centric, to embrace vSphere, Bitnami, Heptio, and (fully and firmly) Kubernetes.
Which means VMware needs to articulate a Tanzu model, very explicitly. Tanzu can’t be an organization, a meaningless collection of stuff like what Kurt Vonnegut called a “granfalloon”. Tanzu has to be a PaaS, a unity created by the pieces of Cloud Foundry and all of VMware’s own acquisitions and initiatives. It has to have specific APIs and specific elements, and those have to present a Cloud-Foundry-Capable interface for the current Pivotal customers, but also an interface that’s aligned with the current market’s Kubernetes-ecosystem thinking. The two can then gradually fuse.
If it’s clear that VMware could create a “karass” (to return to Vonnegut), it’s still a bit murky with respect to what the resulting architecture would look like. “Cloud-native” generally implies microservices, which imply statelessness, microsegmentation, and a bunch of other things that are totally at odds with current mission-critical transactional applications, and likely at odds with even the medium-term data center pieces of hybrid cloud evolution.
A new development model for the hybrid cloud is useful to the extent that the hybrid cloud requires new development. Since we have hybrid cloud now, and without much in the way of specific development for it, it’s obvious that while custom applications for hybrid cloud could be useful, they’re not a necessary condition for hybrid deployments. How useful the custom applications could be, and how they’d be built, is something VMware has to address.
I think it’s reasonable to propose a Pivotal-centric application development model, in part because the Kubernetes ecosystem that’s been onrushing has been vague about development specifics. That fact, though, means that a bunch of other development models are emerging, if extemporaneously. VMware needs to try to build out from the Cloud Foundry approach, “superset it” in a sense. They need a PaaS of their own.
One reason for that is that the Kubernetification of vSphere is a great strategy to transition customers to container deployment, but where does that leave the vSphere base? Just as Pivotal embraced containers too late, VMware could face container victory too late, before they develop anything “sticky” to hold their current vSphere customers in the fold once they transform to containers and Kubernetes. A nice super-PaaS and API set would go a long way toward making sure that container success doesn’t bite VMware in the long run.
They also need to keep an eye out for competitors, notably Red Hat/IBM. IBM is surely among the data-center literati, and Red Hat’s OpenShift is a cloud-native model that’s more versatile than Cloud Foundry’s, as well as not having the taint of a June sales failure to shake off. If PaaS is VMware’s strategy, Red Hat can certainly build one up quickly from open-source elements they’ve already adopted or can integrate with easily.
If hybrid cloud is the future of the cloud, and PaaS is the future of cloud-native, then some kind of explicit fusion of PaaS and traditional transactional application models is needed. There’s nothing wrong with a new, universal, platform on which all applications will be built. I think users would love one, in fact, and I also think that such a platform would provide the player who articulated it best (and first) with a major competitive advantage. Finally, I think that the VMware/Dell and Red Hat/IBM universes are the logical place for such a platform to emerge, which is why Pivotal may be so critical to VMware.
If VMware bets its application future on Cloud Foundry and a total-cloud-or-nothing future, they take a major risk if their key competitor is someone who has been a part of data center evolution for many decades and knows better. If they supplement the Pivotal cloud-native contribution with wise PaaS in the data center, they could move fast enough to stall IBM and Red Hat. It may take years for all this to play out, but I’m pretty confident that the key moves in this critical area will be made, and known, in 2020.