Bring Your Own CNI: Inside VMware’s Open Kubernetes Strategy

Hello everybody. We're here in Amsterdam at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Conference, and we're having a little chat with my friend Himanshu Singh from Broadcom about what's going on with VMware and Kubernetes. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. This is fantastic. We're super excited about being at KubeCon.

It's the preeminent conference in the Kubernetes space and for the platform engineering community, so we're glad to be part of it. As I understand it, there's been some new extensions made to VKS, and maybe you could walk us through what those are a little bit. But as it looks to me, I think you've added support for the container networking interface, and you are kind of now building out an ecosystem.

So what does that look like? Yeah. And I want to kind of maybe even take a step back to bring people through kind of what are we really delivering overall, right?

So of course, the primary offering we have is VMware Cloud Foundation, which is the private cloud platform, and VKS, or vSphere Kubernetes Service, is an inherent, integral part of that. And VKS delivers a CNCF-certified, fully conformant Kubernetes runtime, right? So for the platform teams to be able to use and build all applications.

Now, along with VKS, we also include a variety of other building block services, VM service, volume service, network service, private AI services as well, because AI is a topic that you can't have a conversation without, right? And so the idea is you've got all the building blocks in VCF overall to kind of build whatever modern application you are building, your AI application that you might be building. And it's fully extensible to any third-party service that is CNCF conformant as well.

Right? So what we're trying to do now is in addition to, for example, you talk about CNI with VKS, we ship in a built-in CNI with Antrea. We include Calico in there as well, open source Calico.

6 release that recently came out, we're introducing the idea of bring your own CNI. So you want to do any third party CNI. In this particular case, you want to do Calico Enterprise maybe.

You want to do Cilium, for example. Absolutely available. This actually takes the point of view we've had with our Kubernetes platform, and kind of extends it.

The point of view being that we're not trying to create a highly opinionated ecosystem of our own. We want to be part of the existing community ecosystem. So the way we have built VKS, it is very close to the community of Kubernetes, which means that, one, it's easy to adopt, right?

There's no customizations and all that that you got to do or jump through hoops and everything. Also, it helps us release newer versions of our Kubernetes distro very quickly, right after the community release comes out, typically within 60 days. Right?

So that helps. In addition to that, we're also being able to provide support for multiple releases, like N minus two or more than that. We're including 24 months of support for all our Kubernetes releases as well.

So what that does is it simplifies things from the platform team for the infrastructure teams, so that, one, you don't have to worry about, hey, all these different applications need to be upgraded to the newer version at the same time. Every different team can be on their own timeline when they want to. And also by having that kind of long-term support included, it just reduces or eliminates any kind of, "Hey, we only get 12 months of support.

We need to buy extra support," and all that and those kind of things. In terms of Kubernetes, the community comes out with a new release three to four months. So it's just for us to be able to do that with 24 months of support, you're going to be able to upgrade within that timeframe no problem.

So it just simplifies things a lot overall. So from a Kubernetes perspective, that's one area we're really happy about. The other thing I wanted to also call out is, with the new release as well, of course, and folks might not know this, as part of the VCF platform, we are providing or entitling you to Ubuntu OS for free as included.

However, if you'd rather have RHEL, for example, and you want to use that, you can bring your own RHEL license. We support that completely as well. So it again furthers the idea of having a very open platform for you to be able to use the tools and the technologies that you really like, build it on the VCF platform, build it using VKS, whether you're modernizing an existing application, you're building new AI applications, for example.

So I think that has been something that's been very core to VMware over time, and we're really excited to be able to continue to focus on that kind of mindset as we go forward. It seems like we're starting to see more convergence. And early on I might have seen a DevOps team or a platform engineering team managing Kubernetes in isolation on a handful of workloads.

Now it looks like Kubernetes is becoming more mainstream, but it still runs on a VM most of the time. Yeah. So it seems like we're moving to some point now where those teams can work a little more easily together because there's administrators that know all about VMware, but there's not many of them that know about Kubernetes.

Yeah. So how do you kind of make this team work a little more hand in glove? Yeah, and this is a topic that's very common across organizations.

One is about, hey, we've got people who know the platform. Can we help them up level and upskill them to be able to expand their scope of influence and grow in their careers, for example? Then also looking at, can I do things in a more consistent way, no matter whether I'm using virtual machines or containers, or I'm trying to build a new application?

Can I avoid creating these silos? Right? And so with VCF, that's been very fundamental to our cause.

So oneAs a admin, you can deploy VMs or containers, containers running in virtual machines, so they're getting all the security and isolation benefits that VMs get. But you can do all that with the same set of consistent operations, so you don't have to kind of completely learn a whole new skill. You extend and build on what you already know, and you grow yourself from being a IT admin or VI admin to a cloud admin to a Kubernetes admin, for example.

And so, that's a key benefit of that. You get all the governance policies, all the control that you need, but you're able to then provision your infrastructure for the person wearing the platform hat at that point in time. I don't want to say a platform team because you made the exact point of this is converging.

Yes. And then we are seeing the same thing. People are wearing multiple hats.

So when you're wearing that platform engineer hat, hey, because the VKS as a Kubernetes platform, it's CNCF certified, is extensible, it runs all your applications, right? So that worry is completely out of the question. You get that support, et cetera, that we talked about that simplifies things.

And it just comes with integrations with all these kind of common PE tools that you'd use, whether it is Argo CD, whether it is Helm charts, for example. " That's the idea with built-in integrations. On top of that, in fact, the other thing, what we're doing is, we're not trying to create an ecosystem of our own, right?

We're trying to integrate into the existing ecosystem when the way we're doing it, we're making sure that there are validations available on VKS with a variety of other cloud native leaders in the community, in the industry. In fact, at the conference, we announced new partnerships or new collaborations that we've had with folks like F5, folks like Kong, Tigera, et cetera. And so that it just-- When customers are looking to build on VKS, it's easy for them.

You've got reference architecture, technical guidance, et cetera, that's available to them. And this adds to all these similar kind of guidance that we have with others, like Run:ai, for example, or MuleSoft or Cosmonic, for Rasam. And so I think just bringing it all together, the key idea is we want to make things simpler and easier and more consistent when it comes to the cloud admin persona or a platform engineer persona.

And if you look at it from an organizational perspective overall for the decision maker or somebody with a P&L kind of responsibility, one, hey, all of this contributes to you being able to modernize your applications at a significantly lower TCO, while you're getting all the benefits that VMware has built into the platform over multiple decades, right? The enterprise-grade security, compliance, all the reliability that comes with fundamental kind of VCF platform, no matter what kind of workload you're trying to build on it, right? Whether you're deploying on virtual machines, you're deploying on containers, you're trying to do an AI application.

And to your point about skill sets earlier, right? That this is extremely critical because it helps to, again, not create the silos, but also be able to make sure that your organization and the resource of the people you have are able to grow in their roles and be more productive, and not have to worry about certain things that the platform and the consistency of the platform can take care of for them as well. So I think across those different types of roles that people play, we're super excited about how VCF and VKS are playing that role to make things easier for our customers.

Now, we're also seeing a new type of workload in the proverbial IT zoo, and it's these AI inference models that are coming through. Is that going to force this convergence conversation? Because I can't really have a third set of teams to go support that either.

So is that kind of the thing that's really going to break the proverbial camel's back and get everybody to reorganize? No, I hope not. And fundamentally, while I think there's the data scientist kind of team that typically is generally a team as well, and they're really focused on kind of getting the best out of the model, the LLM that they're trying to do.

And as I mentioned earlier, those private AI services that VCF comes with, we've got a set of capabilities really for that persona. But the idea is, hey, you can extend the same platform built in the same consistent way, and you're going to build it on Kubernetes, right? If you're building an AI application today, you're building it on a Kubernetes platform.

So VKS becomes that substrate that you can build your AI applications. When it comes to the infrastructure side of things, we're giving you that set of capabilities, whether it is things like being able to monitor your GPU utilization and all sorts of different metrics, having consistent dashboards in your existing VCF console to be able to get all those details in there. But also for the data scientist, you have services, for example, and if you need to build an agent, like there's an agent builder service.

There's things like data indexing, retrieval services. There's a full model runtime that comes in. There is something called a model gallery, which helps to make sure that one, you have a role-based access, for example, so the right people are able to access the right set of models.

But also that you have the governance to make sure that you're not just downloading a model from somewhere and starting to use in your enterprise. Because fundamentally, and unfortunately, we've seen this in the industry already, where people don't realize that they're using models that might be public and they are using internal IP or data to query and do those kind of things, and the model ends up kind of absorbing that internal IP, which is never good for an organization. " No matter where you're deploying.

You can be deployingYour private cloud environment in, on a hyperscaler, at an edge environment, at a CSP, for example, or in-house, kind of on-prem data centers. But the same benefit setup that the VCF platform is able to provide to any workload is applicable for AI as well. So that's kind of the way we're looking at not creating this separate silo, separate team, but bring it all together.

People can specialize in the areas that they're trying to do, as a data scientist, for example, or as a platform engineer, for example, but you're building on that same consistent platform that is able to meet everybody's needs as well. You guys have been making a case for the convergence of compute, storage, and networking for a while now. As we look at this convergence and all these things coming together, will we reach a point where maybe we need to fundamentally rethink how the IT team itself is organized and is another way of thinking about this?

Yeah, that's a very interesting point of view. There is always going to be, as we talk to customers, there's more and more expansion of that IT team's role and bringing those capabilities together. " And we completely agree.

There's going to be things that an IT admin can do on the network side to get things started, and we've introduced some of that into the platform as well. But at the same time, you will have that kind of extra kind of specialized needs for that next level. So you can get started easily, get started faster, so that we're not creating delays in the system while you're still able to bring in that special expertise to really optimize the network, for example, or optimize your storage, or optimize your compute, for example.

And so the platform is built that way, so to enable collaboration across these different teams and help them see the value that they provide into the overall system, versus be part of that system overall, versus be separate as a silo on their own. Mm-hmm. It also seems, sometimes we'll talk about things in senses of extremes, but the reality is a little more nuanced.

So we have a lot of cloud-native applications being deployed, and we have a lot of legacy monolithic applications, and those are still being updated as well. They're not just being put on the side per se, and then we're going to have integrations between them. So as we put all that together, does that also require the IT team to get in tune with the development team that's building more complex applications than ever, and they're all connected?

Yeah. If you look at IT teams, at the end of the day, you need to be able to manage that infrastructure, provide the right SLAs to your customer team. Whether the customer is the platform team that's managing certain things, or if the IT team is more extended, where you're serving the needs of developers.

You need to be able to have the governance and the control and all that stuff that you need while being able to provide self-service access to the dev teams, et cetera. Provide that sandbox environment where they have all the access and the flexibility that they need so they can be productive, they can be creative, be innovative, and have faster time to value as they're trying to build these newer applications or modernize some of those applications. Or extending a monolithic application to be able to meet certain needs, or being able to consume services from a third-party provider, for example.

So from a platform perspective, that's a very key piece that we see VCF to be able to do. And so the idea of the IT teams being able to serve the needs of all those different personas or the internal customers is critical. So being able to manage the platform in a very consistent way so you get the governance that you need while providing the flexibility for the other personas is something that's built into VCF as a very fundamental aspect.

"? Well- ... I think different teams are at different stages and different environments, so it's going to vary a lot.

" We do see, to your point earlier, that convergence happening more and more. There's a lot more, I would say, collaboration across those. And then there's organizations where they are trying to basically bring those roles a lot closer together.

I think as we are seeing the evolution of this DevOps and SRE and kind of platform teams happening, IT admins that used to be, for example, having a very specific role are starting to wear multiple hats, to my point earlier. And I think as that changes, as that happens, there's going to be some growing pains, there's going to be some of that learning that different teams will have to do. But I think that's very specific to individual environments.

And the customer, the user teams, are going to be the ones who have the best understanding of what works for them. Based on how they're organized and where they want to get to. I think the critical piece for vendors like ourselves is to be able to provide the platform capabilities that meets all their different needs, and that flexibility needs to be in the solutions that vendors offer.

And so by having the point of view that I was talking about earlier, we're not trying to create a platform and ecosystem of our own. We're trying to make sure that we're part of the ecosystem that exists so that all the different personas are able to do what they like, do what they prefer. And so we're meeting them where they are, versus other teams trying to come to them.

" Mm-hmm. I think it's the art of all teams, right? There's only one team, but we need to figure out how to let everybody do what they need to do without getting in each other's way.

Yeah. Hey, Himanshu, thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me.

All right. And we'll be back in a minute.