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The Essence of VMWARE Explore: 5 consultants reveal their crucial learnings.
As is customary, Axxes was represented at VMware Explore this year. Five days of community, breakout sessions, and keynotes. It's the prime venue to elucidate the vision for the future and explore new markets. During the General Keynote, Audi was among the featured guests. They proudly highlighted their collaboration regarding the implementation of virtual PLCs in a German factory. It's a new technology on which both companies have been working together recently. In addition to the sessions, there is also much to experience annually in The Hub and The Expo. These are the ideal venues to network, indulge in some pinball, or alternate between theory and hands-on labs (labs.hol.vmware.com). New this year was the "design with us" booth, where attendees could provide feedback interactively. Think of Jenga blocks with a question on them.
Generative AI
At VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona, various developments in Generative AI were presented. Gen. AI deals with the creation of new data, such as text, images, or sound. This technology holds significant potential, especially for businesses. However, there are challenges to address, such as privacy and security.
One of the key advancements in the field of Gen. AI is the increasing availability of powerful hardware. Thanks to this hardware, Gen. AI models can process much larger datasets and perform more complex tasks. This enables the use of Gen. AI for new applications, such as generating realistic images for marketing purposes or creating new forms of art.
Another important development is the growing attention to privacy and security. Gen. AI models are often trained on datasets containing sensitive information. This can pose privacy risks if this information falls into the wrong hands. Therefore, VMware has initiated several initiatives to enhance privacy and security in Gen. AI. For example, the company introduced VMware Private AI, an architecture that enables training and use of Gen. AI models in a way that ensures privacy and security.
The presented developments indicate that Gen. AI is a promising technology and will have a bright future with great potential in the business world.
Multi-Cloud
For Arjan, it was his first VMware Explore attendance, and in his role as a project manager, he doesn't work with VMware on a daily basis. Therefore, his goal was to learn everything new within the VMware landscape, despite being very active in it for the past 15 years. His interests mainly revolved around VMware Multi-Cloud, Aria, Tanzu Mission Control, and VSAN 8 ESA. The demo on migrating VMs across the cloud from On-Prem to VMware on AWS and from VMware on Azure blew his mind. A memorable moment for him was the first vMotion between different hosts without losing a ping. Now, we can do the same but to the other side of the world. Additionally, the integration between cloud and On-Prem is fantastic. VMware Explore provided him with a fantastic overview of everything VMware currently offers, and it still interests him in technology to this day.
Aria Operations
One of the sessions that Frederik found most memorable was about how VMware Aria Operations can be used to gain insight into your infrastructure using AI. It helps identify servers that have been allocated too few or too many resources and provides a clear view of workload distribution. To keep the CO2 footprint in check, it also provides a clear overview of servers that have been idle for extended periods. This allows administrators to contact the VM owner to determine if the server is still needed, or automated jobs can be set up to automatically power off (or even remove) servers that have been idle for a long time. Go Green IT with Aria!
Tanzu
At VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona, Vincent attended his second edition after a nine-year hiatus. While the previous edition had surprised him with HCI, VXRail, NSX, and so on, it was clear that IT is constantly evolving. Currently, there is an immense transformation happening within the infrastructure world. Terms like containers, Kubernetes, Aria, Tanzu, and AI are now integral parts of the landscape. That's why most of the sessions he attended - deliberately - focused on the platform engineering landscape.
The session that left the biggest impression on him, despite its simple title, was "Introduction to VMware Tanzu." It was a combination of theory and practice presented by two articulate and motivated speakers, providing valuable insights into this new world and the direction IT is heading.
The session covered the three pillars within platform engineering and how Tanzu as an end-to-end product fits into this landscape, regardless of the underlying layer (Azure, AWS, Google, on-premises, AKS, Openshift, etc.).
- Develop: encompasses the entire phase from a new business idea to delivering a new image/container that is production-ready = "the path to production".
- Operate: how to run this application/container in production, what packages are needed, how to scale it, how to make it highly available and secure, how to meet SLAs, how to apply policies, etc.
- Optimize: do I meet my security requirements, are there vulnerabilities, is my application cost-efficient, maybe I can scale differently or use a different cloud, etc.?
- In summary, VMware Tanzu provides a platform where developers can fully focus on coding without worrying about software packages/versions, vulnerabilities, compatibility, etc., and they can easily spin up or decommission a new development environment. Meanwhile, the platform engineer can use Tanzu to meet requirements, security, availability, etc., by taking newly developed applications into production via a supply chain/pipeline. This supply chain checks your code, performs vulnerability scanning, conducts tests, builds containers, etc., all according to business needs.
Just imagine the impact AI integration in the Tanzu platform could have within the optimize pillar!
This article is written by the following Axxes consultants:
