Chad Dunn, Dell EMC | VMworld 2019

Chad Dunn, Vice President of Product Management Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Dell EMC, talks with Stu Miniman & Bobby Allen, CloudGenera, at VMworld 2019 from Moscone North in San Francisco, CA.

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A hybrid pragmatist’s guide to going cloud native

What is your company’s cloud-native forecast? Developers might get flushed and excited at the thought of building cloud-native apps or learning the skills to do so. But information-technology leaders and executives may still consider cloud native too new, too expensive, or too high-tech for their organizations. Approachable new tech with cloud-native capabilities may bring it within their reach.

Companies are slowly giving their cloud-native fantasies real-world legs, according to Chad Dunn (pictured), vice president of product management, hyperconverged infrastructure, at Dell EMC.

Attendees at Dell and EMC events used to express vague ideas about their companies’ cloud-native adoption, Dunn pointed out. Today, many have a clearer, more ambitious cloud-native strategy. “Now, they’re telling us about what those projects are. And they’re rapidly adopting them,” Dunn said.

Hybrid tech gets cloud-native show on the road
Despite the growth in cloud-native projects, many companies remain in hybrid-cloud limbo. They find themselves on the fence about their workloads; do they keep them on-premises or move them to cloud? Refactor them to cloud-native apps? Retire them entirely?

With the right technologies, they can walk a middle path, according to Dunn. For example, they can move workloads to cloud as VMware Inc. virtual machines and enjoy cloud economics while they decide which to refactor or throw out. Dell Technologies Cloud Platform based on VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail affords them to flexibility to do so, Dunn added.

VCF on VxRail allows users to create workload domains that are traditional infrastructure as a service with VMs and also spin up containers as a service workload domains with PKS and NSX-T. (Containers are a virtualized method for running distributed apps.)

“As you start to refactor those applications and as that balance changes, you’d simply increase the number and the size of your cloud-native workload domains, and you shrink your infrastructure as a service,” Dunn stated.

VMware has also embedded the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration platform into its ESXi hypervisor. Dunn calls this a “game changer.” In fact, VMware now has all of the software assets to build, run and manage cloud-native workloads. And the company is working on ways to architect the software in VxRail for a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)