Ossama Eldeeb, Senior Director, Partner Organization, South EMEA, VMware talks about how channel partners can help customers advance with modern applications
Earlier this year three quarters of CIOs named app modernisation as a top priority, but at the same time almost 48% of executives admitted it had been over a year since they’d made improvements to their app portfolios. Why is there this perceived conflict between what they want to achieve and what they are actioning? Too often it’s the risk to business operations, combined with the cost of another in-place patch or upgrade, that is felt to be too high. On top of that, complex architectures and inconsistent approaches to creating, running, managing and protecting applications are holding development back.
This approach isn’t sustainable. IDC predicts that, by 2025, nearly two thirds of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code deployed daily, more than 90% of apps will be cloud native, and there will be 1.6 times more developers than today. And it is the developer who has become crucial, as they become more influential in broader IT and infrastructure decisions.
Also, it is containerization that has been a game-changer for developers to create and deploy apps faster and at unprecedented scale. In fact, this use of containers is only going to grow – according to Gartner, by 2025, more than 80% of software vendors will offer their application software in container format, up from less than 10% today.
Kubernetes, an open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, is leading the charge. Currently, 86% of containerized apps are on Kubernetes.
But where are we today? Do enterprises fully understand the opportunity presented by Kubernetes? Where are the hurdles to adoption – and how can partners help enterprises take advantage?
Firstly, let’s start with why enterprises are modernising in this way. Above and beyond everything else, this is about building new revenue-generating customer experiences via applications – as the future of business differentiation and customer-facing services begins and ends with an organisation’s app portfolio. Then, sitting alongside this, are the pressing needs to manage a growing volume of software vulnerabilities, and to drive competitive advantage from new innovations now being offered by the cloud.
With these points, however, lie immediate challenges. We are seeing application teams being asked to break down monolithic applications and rebuild as microservices-based apps, development teams under pressure to deliver new features to customers faster, and enterprises facing outsized security risks from compromised containers and / or applications. At the heart of all of this is the issue of complexity – that of the modern apps themselves, and how they are often made up of multiple VMs, containers, and services, and run across a variety of heterogeneous architectures. The number one obstacle is that it is difficult to match the needs of applications to the right underlying infrastructure.
The challenge, and opportunity, lies in addressing this at both an application and infrastructure level – solving the developer experience and operator experience across clouds, while addressing the most common scenarios enterprises encounter in their efforts to modernise infrastructure and applications.
And the technology to do this is out there; we can now simplify operations of Kubernetes for multi-cloud, centralizing management and governance for many clusters and teams across on-premises, public clouds and edge environments. This is about democratising infrastructure; extending an enterprise ready Kubernetes operating model across organisations’ data centers and public clouds so they can run and manage modernised workloads alongside existing software – a single platform for running all applications. Our Kubernetes platform is VMware Tanzu, and our strategy supports this trend, giving developers and IT teams a single platform to manage legacy workloads on VMs, as well as more modern, containerized apps – across any cloud.
So what needs to be done? Below are three key ways in which Kubernetes platforms such as Tanzu can benefit enterprises, and the main consideration points for partners as they enable organisations to use this to futureproof their application delivery and supporting infrastructure.
Aligning stakeholders and driving decisions with a single source of truth across the entire stack.
Instead of different stakeholders making decisions based on different data sources, there’s the opportunity to bring everything together into one complete picture of the stack. This is about centralised visibility and management; the ability to ingest all data sources and apply analytics and then route results to the right person. With this, infrastructure leaders can see the health of their environments, and developers can see the behaviour of their apps in production. So everyone makes better decisions, together.
In pursuit of realising this, partners should investigate; whether developers in the organisation have visibility into how their code performs in production; how many monitoring / observability tools are in use today; and how these tools will scale as more apps are deployed.
Ensuring secure, reliable communication across clouds with no application code changes.
As their estates of modern applications grows, enterprises will have more endpoints to monitor and more services to maintain. This necessitates central visibility of endpoints across VMs and containers, on-premises and public clouds, and the use of global policies to ensure compliance and audit trails are ever-present. The goal is improved security and resiliency, as organisations build new, cloud native applications or rearchitect and containerize existing business-critical workloads using curated, validated and always updated images.
The key points to interrogate here include; whether the enterprise knows where all opensource containers used by various development teams are sourced, and if they trust that vulnerabilities won’t be introduced; how they track the licenses of all the binaries and libraries in open-source software; and how they track multiple copies of software maintained in-house to ensure it’s secure, up-to-date, and compliant.
Getting more software into production, at speed.
The path to production is composed of many pieces, and developers have to navigate many steps to get their code into production. It’s full of friction that slows down development cycles. Platforms like VMware Tanzu can pull everything together into an integrated and automated path, so developers can write five lines of code to push their software into production, including all dependencies and accounting for security. Improving developer capacity in this way means the organization can deliver better software, faster. That means more revenue generating features, faster patches and happier customers.
Here, partners should push enterprises to answer; exactly how they get their apps to production today; how their last production deployment went and what issues were encountered; where most of their business apps run today; and what are the next set of apps they want to modernize.
These are elements enterprises must get right, today. The customer experience is now inextricably linked to the app portfolio, as the pace of business innovation increases thanks to DevOps. A comparison of ‘elite’ (those organisations in the highest possible performance category) versus low performing organisations shows the former have 208x more frequent code deploys, a 2,604x faster time to restore service, and 7x better change failure rates.
Yet too many organizations still suffer from layers of manual processes designed to minimize risk and ensure compliance – making app releases infrequent, high-risk events. In addition, a lack of cloud native experience and expertise exacerbates the challenge.
The opportunity for IT and developers to fuel greater digital transformation lies in keeping it as simple as possible. The reality is that some businesses are more ready for Kubernetes than others. So, in this era of modernising apps, there must be a greater focus on making Kubernetes ‘enterprise consumable’ – delivering developer-ready capabilities to ensure that it is easy to implement and scale when the time is right; where no one has to make any decisions between VMs and containers, there is no need to rebuild existing apps to run in containers, and where the platform supports all the major public clouds, so truly multi-cloud.
At VMware, through our Tanzu strategy we’ve done this by bringing Kubernetes to the 70 million+ workloads running on vSphere, and this is also where partners come in – bringing the technical expertise and consultancy to help organisations streamline application modernisation efforts. It is trusted partners that can bring together Dev and Ops teams, ensuring the organisation has the right platform, catering for all clouds with consistent operations, to deliver better software to production, continuously.
With this in place, enterprises can connect the dots and turn the app modernization aspirations of CIOs into a reality, successfully enabling the organisational shift towards app-centricity to drive business growth.
Partner view
Sivagurunathan Sankaranarayanan, CTO of HUCO, a technology partner company that achieved VMware Master Services Competency Cloud Native last year, said that organizations currently tend to understand the importance of agile application delivery and how modern applications bring them agility, although further dialogue may be needed. “It then often requires a conversation,” Sankaranarayanan said. “When we explain how Kubernetes itself best enables modern applications, organizations are able to better understand the specific opportunity presented by this technology.”
Where do you see the common pitfalls and hurdles to adoption?
The main hurdles we’ve witnessed are a resistance to change and the challenge of upskilling; of bringing the required modern application skillsets into the existing operations teams.
How do you think partners help enterprises take advantage?
Partners can help enterprises significantly. Our recommendation would be that a small, dedicated team supports the enterprise adoption of newer initiatives like Machine Learning, Blockchain, AI within Kubernetes. Then, this team works to establish quick wins that demonstrate the benefits Kubernetes can bring, to position itself as a Kubernetes ‘ambassador’ that can lead an increased adoption across the enterprise.
