One of the most interesting sessions from the VMworld partner day was “Winning against AWS and Microsoft Azure with SDDC and Hybrid Cloud” presented by Jim Armstrong and Matthew Kwok. Both presenters are part of the vCloud Air business unit.
Prior to the session I was thinking this was not a particularly audacious start to the week, rather than embracing public cloud VMware is trying to tell partners that the VMware SDDC is a competitor to public cloud. Fortunately the session was pretty much completely focused on vCloud Air rather than on the private cloud aspects.
One curious shift in the last year or so is that everyone is now acknowledging that AWS and Microsoft Azure are the two dominant public cloud services. Only twelve months ago there seemed to be a concerted effort to elevate Google’s cloud adoption and to downplay Microsoft to a distant third place, but the reality of Microsoft’s ascension is now generally acknowledged by friend and foe alike.
VMware see Microsoft as their number one competitor in the cloud space due to Microsoft’s strong focus on hybrid cloud. AWS is seen as a somewhat different value proposition.
Challenge is that AWS and MS are talking about a cloud transformation where VMware vCloud Air is seen as an extension to what you are doing with vSphere. Private cloud has not taken off because there is nothing transformational.
VMware believes there is a need to move to a conversation about workloads and use cases. VMware say that vCloud Air has been successful with lift and shift and Disaster Recovery scenarios. However the sweet spot for cloud is app modernization. NSX is a great competitive advantage for vCloud Air for app modernization, VMware with Pivotal is ready for cloud native apps.
The presenters gave a good analysis of the Microsoft Azure market position. They see some of the weaknesses as relatively poor ability to migrate applications “as is” into IaaS. The Microsoft SLAs around single instance applications is seen as a major competitive disadvantage. Availability sets require refactoring, and you need to run more VMs in Azure compared to vCloud Air. They made some valid points around Microsoft’s existing limitations in management tools and existing skill sets.
They took a few pot shots at Azure Site Recovery, with some relatively valid points around the challenges of using VM conversion as part of an ongoing Disaster Recovery strategy and the challenges in trying to restore the production environment after the disaster scenario has been addressed. I completely agree with this, the challenge is that customers are starting to think about migrating on premise private clouds as well.
AWS is focused on applications and mission critical workloads, Oracle and SAP HANA. They see one of the big disadvantage of AWS is lock in. The VMware conversation is to use a third party PaaS platform such as Pivotal to give flexibility and portability. Cloud Foundry runs on all cloud and container platforms and provides the best opportunity for portability of applications between clouds.
Once again the challenge with AWS is having to re-architect applications and convert virtual machines for IaaS. No native DR tools, rely on third party tools, support is complex in a disaster recovery scenario. Most customers who use AWS tend to have a multi cloud strategy, either with Office 365 or Google Apps. Adding vCloud Air for DR or for IaaS bursting makes sense as a multi cloud strategy.