At the VMware Explore 2022 Europe conference, IBM this week announced an IBM Cloud for VMware-as-a-Service offering that integrates instances of VMware Cloud with the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform managed by IBM in the cloud.
Rohit Badlaney, vice president of product management and strategy for IBM Cloud, said now that VMware Cloud can be consumed as a subscription service, it’s now possible for IBM to integrate it with its cloud platform to create a fully managed service. Previously, IT organizations would have had to separately license VMware Cloud and deploy it on IBM Cloud themselves, he noted.
In general, Badlaney said IBM is focused on working with organizations in highly regulated industries that need to run complex workloads in the cloud. IBM is not interested in competing against other cloud service providers to run workloads on commodity infrastructure, he added.
The majority of applications that run in the cloud today consume a narrow range of memory and storage resources. The IBM cloud is clearly more focused on providing higher-margin services to complement the cloud infrastructure it makes available via its data centers. Less clear is to what degree monolithic applications running in on-premises IT environments are being lifted and shifted to the cloud. While there is clearly a segment of organizations that no longer want to operate their own data centers, the bulk of applications continue to run in on-premises IT environments. The reasons for this include everything from performance requirements and security concerns to regulatory compliance issues.
However, since most on-premises applications run on VMware virtual machines, much of the focus on cloud migration has revolved around platforms that would not require IT teams to refactor applications to run on a different virtual machine platform. IBM is also betting that, given the current state of the global economy, more organizations will soon be opting to not manage their own data centers. Cloud platforms managed by a third party would enable those organizations to focus more of their own internal IT efforts on application development and deployment.
Each organization will need to determine for itself whether to treat IT as an operating versus a capital expense, depending on which approach makes the most economic sense. Organizations that have embraced DevOps workflows would need to align the way they build and deploy applications to a managed service.
In theory, of course, a managed cloud computing service makes IT teams more agile and efficient. Less IT infrastructure winds up being overprovisioned by developers that can programmatically spin up resources on demand. Of course, there are a lot of IT stacks other than VMware Cloud that can be deployed in the cloud. IBM, for example, makes available the Red Hat OpenShift platform to run cloud-native applications on Kubernetes clusters. IBM has not yet committed to offering the VMware Tanzu platform for running those types of applications.
Not every application is going to wind up running in the cloud, but what is certain is that application environments are becoming more complex to manage in the next era of cloud computing.
