Remember the dreadful old days of cloud computing? The days in which you were limited to consuming services such as S3, RDS, and Lambda to create a serverless application? Remember when we had well-understood concepts such as DevOps to manage these applications at scale? Teams leveraged these backend services and processes to build micro-services based applications that disrupted entire industries? Those were ancient days, and we developed like cave dwellers. Thank the Googlers that Kubernetes (K8s) was created to remind us that computer science is hard, just as it was always meant to be.

I heard something the other day that came as a surprise. Andreessen Horowitz predicted that the cost of CPU’s would go to zero. It immediately got me to thinking about writing a piece on it. Some schmuck beat me to it. It wasn’t new news. I had heard it before, but it was just as jarring as the first time I heard it. I decided to take a fresh look at the idea three years later via the newsletter.

VMworld has become the conference where the hybrid-cloud conversations happen. In talking with customers, there’s no doubt that the future of enterprise IT includes a balance between on-premises and public cloud workloads. As one of VMware’s biggest partners, HPE is in the middle of the conversation. However, Dell now owns a majority of VMware. Unlike EMC, Dell has not been shy in leveraging that relationship in the field and from a product perspective. Dell Tech has increased its overall market share in several areas. I sat down with HPE for a series of sponsored interviews at VMworld 2019 to understand the relationship.

How does a cloud-first strategy impact your campus network design and operations?

I'm currently helping a client migrate their campus networks to a new platform. As a Saleforce.com solution provider, they are all in on the public cloud. All collaboration is SaaS-based, including telephone services. The project forces me to re-think all I know about traditional campus and wide-area networking. Couple that with Gelstalt IT hosting me at a Network Field Day Extra (NFDx) at 128-Technologies, and I come away with some new areas to ponder going into VMworld 2019.

TL:DR The CTO Advisor is launching a Newsletter!

The drive to SaaS has resulted in a complete re-design of the WAN. How does SD-WAN allow business users leverage multiple internet connections?

Oracle announced the shuttering of their Ravello Systems solution. Is the inability to capitalize on the $500M purchase an example of Oracle becoming too big to innovate?

I’ve taken up the hobby of creating a video series on installing Kubernetes and OpenFaaS. From the experience, I learned why you never want to learn how to install and configure Kubernetes and OpenFaaS. The reasoning is beyond K8s as infrastructure and infrastructure bores. It’s about the breadth of knowledge an architect or CTO must have to meet the needs of digital experience.

2019 will go down as the year it all changed for VMware. Count me in the camp of people who weren’t impressed with their vSphere everywhere cloud strategy or 2016. Having vSphere in the major cloud providers wasn’t enough. Fast-forward to today and VMware is a significant player in cloud-native, storage, and networking.

VMware’s latest earnings show a 13% year-over-year growth. However, VMware can’t enter these spaces without developing new relationships within customers and growing the pool of full-stack engineers. What has the company done to further the soft conversation around talent?

A competitor has started to win your customers by providing a better digital experience. They’ve built an SAP Fiori app that enables sales teams to check the account status of a customer before going into a big sales meeting. At the end of the sales call, the salesperson can not only ask for the sale but complete the transaction with a signature on the iPad. Your turnaround for the same operation still takes days.

Technically, VMware Cloud (VMC) is any service found on cloud.vmware.com. However, from a practical sense when I talk with a customer, they want to know when VMC will come to their cloud provider of choice. Let’s take a shot at understanding how you go about the "any cloud" strategy Pat Gelsinger laid at VMworld 2017.

Will Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provide an advantage that AWS and Azure can’t match for lift and shift? Both AWS and Azure have gone the route of offering some VMware staging area for legacy applications. AWS has VMC on AWS and Azure has a hosted VMware solution. The idea is to keep operational differences to a minimum between on-premises hosting and cloud. However, the price has been a consistent factor. Customers worry inertia will result in indefinite reliance on VMware vSphere software.

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At what point do you have to worry about snowflakes becoming a snow storm? That’s the challenge presented to Architectural Review Boards in most enterprises. At what point is a solution worth the added complexity? A discussion between career IT professionals took place on Twitter around Googles Anthos Migrate announcement.

Intel’s DC Persistent memory is revolutionary that will power the next innovation in business intelligence. Intel DC Persistent Memory is BIT addressable 3D-NAND (FLASH) memory. The last Intel product allows you to insert it into DIMM slots on a server. However, what does that mean for performance and business capability? I think SAP HANA is the best example of what’s possible.

Software as a Service or SaaS is Pubic cloud computing. I was tempted to make this statement in a tweet vs. dedicating a whole blog post, but I wanted to add to the knowledge graph on the topic. Also, Matthew Broberg asked a great follow-on question as part of a spirited LinkedIn discussion.

The industry agrees - “Cloud is an operating model not a place.”

If you move all your virtual machines to AWS do you now have a cloud? Or is it something else? If the cloud is an operating model vs. a place, what model do you have in lift and shift? I submit that you have hybrid-infrastructure. If the cloud is an operating model, it must be equally valid that hybrid-infrastructure is an operating model.

AI/ML vendors at large present the magical view that you ask your data lakes a business question and out shoots an answer that drives a new business insight. I spoke with the Chief Data Officer (CDO) of a Fortune 500. The company struggled with normalizing over 100 different data sources. Data scientists spent up to 70% of their time normalizing the data before even applying algorithms. Will leveraging metadata decrease time to value for data analysis?

That one time you weren’t able to recover the set of emails that were a request due to legal hold proved painful. You now take backup exceptionally seriously. So much so, you now have hundreds of TB’s of data sitting on archive media. Economic advisors call it the new oil. So much insight could be made available via that wealth of data; only if there were an easy button to ingest what’s an organic, unstructured data lake. Enter the new era of backup companies such as Cohesity.

What’s the new reality of IT? You read the latest from cloud providers and management consultants and you walk away thinking every company from the corner baker to Fortune 100 enterprises has digitally transformed and moved to a cloud-native environment. You then get data from IT vendors showing 90% of the companies that run to the cloud, move back on-prem. We know the truth is somewhere in-between. So, what’s the deal?