Earlier this week, VMware announce several new products and capabilities at the annual VMworld US event. Among these were a few announcements related to the cloud-native space that I will highlight in this post.

Highlights

PKS on VMware – According to VMware, the best way to run containers is on virtual machines (obviously). To address the challenges related to networking, security, storage and monitoring Kubernetes clusters, VMware is bringing together multiple products from its portfolio. Open source Harbor registry, along with VMware NSX and Bosh from Pivotal form the VMware PKS offering. PKS can be deployed on public clouds as well as VMware Cloud Foundation.

Quoting VMWare’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, “Kubernetes is quickly, maybe spectacularly, becoming seen as the consensus way that containers will be managed and automated,” he told the audience. “It’s the framework for how modern app teams are looking at their next-generation environment, quickly emerging as a key to how businesses build and deploy their applications today. And containers are efficient, lightweight, portable — they have a lot of values for developers.”

NSX for Kubernetes – At the keynote, VMware demonstrated creating and deleting networks using NSX as namespaces are created and deleted in Kubernetes. This eliminates the need for network admins to intervene when developers deploy new applications giving developers the ultimate control.

Wavefront for Kubernetes visibility – Another short demo included VMware Wavefront dashboard for Kubernetes to help operators support and manage Kubernetes clusters. As clusters grow in size and as more applications are deployed on these clusters, having complete visibility into what is running where and what the resource consumption is, becomes important.

Cloud Assembly – VMware announced a new service that delivers unified provisioning across all clouds through declarative Infrastructure as Code, including VMware Cloud on AWS, native AWS, Microsoft Azure and Helm. This helps teams orchestrate infrastructure and application delivery in line with DevOps principles.

Another major announcement was support for Amazon RDS on VMware. Amazon RDS on VMware is a service that makes it easy for customers to set up, operate, and scale databases in VMware-based data centers and hybrid environments and to migrate them to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS. Amazon RDS on VMware automates database management regardless of where the database is deployed, freeing up customers to focus on developing and tuning their applications.

Summary

Based on the above announcements, one thing is clear. VMware has completely embraced cloud and is increasingly embracing containers. Cloud and containers, were both expected to be a huge threat to VMware but by embracing these technologies and incorporating them in their product, VMware is likely to benefit from the growth in these markets as its core server virtualization market saturates.