VMware customers—and more specifically customers of VMware’s vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestration (vRO)—are currently living through a trifecta of disconcerting realities that have many of them rightfully worried. There’s a perfect storm brewing, and in the cloud that’s never good.  

Understanding The Trifecta 

So, what exactly are the three main issues causing growing consternation and gnashing of teeth? Well, the one gaining the most media attention right now is Broadcom’s announcement of its desire to purchase VMware for $61 Billion. Seasoned IT veterans will remember from the CA (Computer Associates) and Symantec acquisitions that Broadcom has a track record of buying a customer base and then milking the cash cow for as long as possible. Note the first sentence in this article from The Register: “VMware customers have seen companies acquired by Broadcom Software emerge with lower profiles, slower innovation, and higher prices – a combination that makes them nervous about the virtualization giant’s future.” And that’s what happens if you’re one of the largest (read: most important) customers. If you’re not a top 500 customer then your prospects could be even bleaker as forced attrition may be in your future using history as our guide. 

While I don’t advocate chasing ambulances or reveling in the misfortunes of others, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge the second issue at hand—VMware’s security is in question as a result of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) finding four vulnerabilities among various VMware commercial products. Two of the four vulnerabilities were actively being exploited by cyber-attackers, affecting the following VMware products: 

The third and final issue in this perfect storm is actually specific to vRA/vRO customers and is a self-inflicted wound: VMware is ending support for vRealize Automation 7.6 and earlier (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 and earlier (vRO), forcing customers into making a painful choice—stay with vRealize and painstakingly re-write all of their integrations, automations, and processes over again in the newer version or seek alternatives (Terraform, Native Tools, VMware competitors) to replace vRA/vRO altogether.   

What steps can be taken now? 

Who knows what the future brings, but hedging your bets and protecting yourself a bit can pay dividends later. Seems obvious, but you want to minimize your reliance on any one solution, particularly the ones identified above. Broadcom is obviously not going to tank the entire VMware business and honestly, they’re incentivized to make it thrive, but history tells us to proceed with caution. Just revisit recent Broadcom acquisitions—CA Technologies (acquired in 2018) and Symantec (in 2019)—and examine who exactly benefited. 

Put New VMware Purchases On-Hold 

If you were planning any new VMware purchases, taking a more cautious approach may be prudent. It never hurts to wait and see how things “shake out” post-acquisition. If you must have something now, don’t bite on a typical 3-year commitment. Keep an escape plan with as little financial and technical risk as possible. Similarly, I would suspend any VMware professional service engagements that are not critical. Maintain your optionality. 

Redundancy & Overlapping Capabilities 

How many different versions of Terraform, Ansible, or other projects are running independently in your environment today? Most organizations have some sort of cloud management tooling, be it native or commercial, and most have some sort of cost tracking approach, either manual or commercial. How many tools are needed and can you consolidate to cover if VMware tools are no longer in the mix? What is the lift (cost & effort) to make that happen? Start planning now. Have a “Plan B” just in case. 

 

Search for Alternatives 

Know what new technologies are available. How is the market talking about solving for your specific challenges now vs 2 years ago? What vendors and solutions are popular now for your use case(s)? Why are they popular? Do you prefer a managed-service or DYI approach? If you had to switch tomorrow… You catch my drift. Be prepared!  

Learn more about the Broadcom merger

You’ve heard the phrase, ”all good things must come to an end.” I have no idea if VMware’s time has come or is only beginning to take off for new heights. But the past tells a cautionary tale and recent findings don’t help the situation. The advice I give is simply this—have a backup plan. As with anything else in life or business, plan for contingencies or plan to fail. 

I have spent a 20+ career with vendors making arguments for commercial software and against building capabilities internally. While I believe the benefits of commercial software generally outweigh the benefits of internally developed, they both have huge benefits! Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t one enable and facilitate the other?  

The drive to the cloud and multi-cloud environments is pushing the boundaries of build vs buy. Native cloud management tools tend to focus on their resources, but don’t help much with a multi-cloud approach yet 94% of IT leaders agree a hybrid approach is critical1. Most cloud & cost management tools are great with AWS or VMware or Azure, but not good at managing, tracking, governing, and optimizing them ALL.   

Isn’t this what 94% of IT leaders said they wanted?  

Compounding the problem is every organization’s need to innovate and seek new ways to solve customers’ problems. When IT cannot deliver consistent and timely access to resources for engineers/developers to invent/build/solve customer problems, they go around IT and access resources on their own. If they are not provided adequate (or even good) cloud automation or cloud management tools to perform their jobs, they buy their own or use open-source versions. If you have hundreds (thousands, tens of thousands…. gets worse the more you have) of developers/engineers running their own unique tools, then you miss out on the speed of consistency, re-use, and sharing of the best. Cloud observability becomes infinitely more difficult in these multi-cloud, multi-tool worlds.  

How do you get a true “near-real-time” view of consumption across all public and on-prem infrastructure? 

Who is going to build that view? Are those who want the views builders? Why just buy a solution to ‘view’…why not buy it to govern, automate, and optimize too?  

“Views” only go so far… a window to see a disaster coming is good but less effective than one that provide tools to combat the issues it shows you. Are the views complete? How many rogue multi-cloud tools are there and how much Shadow IT infrastructure usage is going on? Without being able to know and see it all, how can you ever get the chaos under control?  

What if you could have the best of both worlds? – 

“Bring Your Own Tool (BYOT)’ AND get the visibility, governance,  

automation, and optimization of the business needs with CloudBolt 

CloudBolt has been making acquisitions, expanding flexibility, and adding unique capabilities for years. We’re excited to offer an evolved approach to hybrid cloud management. We call it the CloudBolt Framework and it helps companies automate easily, optimize continuously, and govern at scale by unifying disparate capabilities for DevOps, ITOps, FinOps, and SecOps.  

By pulling together islands of automation, our framework helps bring order to chaos both today and tomorrow. 

Ready to learn more? See how CloudBolt can help you get the most out of your cloud.

Terraform is great but it’s not perfect. In fact, there are some critical “buts” that need to be addressed to elevate and accelerate its performance and impact.  

Terraform is great, but…

…it requires a significant cognitive load

Time spent learning how to use Terraform is more time spent not developing, not building the next customer answer, not innovating. Additionally, Terraform requires inputs—how are those captured, shared, and managed? It’s hard enough to learn how to use but also where to find the inputs (e.g. Cloud environments, instance types, networks, etc.). 

If you have lots of dev teams then you also have lots of people at varying stages of Terraform learning and expertise. Abstracting away cloud infrastructure complexities through automation should be applied to Terraform, just like AWS, vCenter, or Ansible before it.  

The reason to adopt and use new technology is to improve the process in some way, and the faster you can use sit with the least amount of knowledge required the better.  

So what’s the answer? Build automation, orchestration, and security directly into a Terraform plan to decrease errors, accelerate timelines, and vastly reduce learning curves. 

…it’s not always easy to share what works across the organization so others can benefit. 

Terraform plans and exciting use cases rarely get shared across the organization. Siloed dev teams form in isolation, minimizing the impact of better ways, new processes, or optimized configurations. Keeping a lid on the cool, new, and exciting ways your people are using Terraform only minimizes the potential impact. 

Stop inventing and re-inventing the wheel. Harness innovation, breakthroughs, and efficient orchestration by sharing with others across the organization so everyone benefits. How much faster can the team move when everyone is able to rapidly leverage what works? 

…is woefully lacking in governance, visibility, and reporting. 

Your finance/FinOps team is continuously seeking an accurate view of infrastructure consumption, be that on-prem, private, or public clouds. Since Terraform is an open-source tool it’s easy for an individual or a specific team to use as they see fit. As a result, the same groups often provision and use infrastructure outside of normal channels (e.g. purchase direction via credit card). And when that happens, there is no hope for visibility, compliance, cost control, security, or governance. It’s shadow IT, even when done with the best of intentions. Any developer or group not using org-approved resources is creating blind spots. Secure? Not sure. Visible? Not likely. Automated? Maybe. 

A management and cloud operations framework allows you to standardize Terraform plans, automate and orchestrate processes, build security into plans, and gain visibility, tracking, and reporting on Terraform use of infrastructure across the organization. 

The Net-Net 

Terraform truly is a great technology, but there are some costly gaps that must be filled, especially in hybrid/multi-cloud environments. While using Terraform in disparate groups throughout the organization has benefits it may also be creating costly issues that diminish the value, increase cost, and slow down innovation. 

Make your Terraform experience better, more efficient, secure, and re-usable so that your whole organization gains the greatest benefits and advantages. No buts about it.

Happy Terraforming!  See how CloudBolt can help. Request a demo.

Admittedly the title is a bit vague, but what I’m specifically referencing is making sense of multi-cloud infrastructure. Cost, Optimization, Automation, Self-Service, Orchestration, Governance, Security, Compliance… and the list continues! Simply stated…organizations today are struggling! As they introduce 2nd and even 3rd cloud options, cost roll-up, multi-cloud automation/orchestration, resource optimization, and reuse become exponentially more difficult! In the most recent CloudBolt Industry Insights Report (CII) 95% of surveyed IT professionals agree they have a real skills deficiency to handle the complexity.

The opportunity in front of cloud-oriented service providers is MASSIVE! Nearly every enterprise is struggling with how to better manage cloud costs and increase visibility across multi-cloud environments, even if they have existing or native tools! MSP & CSP customers are telling you what they want and how (see below)… For the MSPs/CSPs that figure it out, there is a vast majority of organizations seeking to pay a premium to remove cloud complexity!

The Danger of Doing Nothing

In the research mentioned above, 300 MSP/CSP customers shared that 4 out of 5 (80%) of them are “so frustrated with their current MSP that they are actively looking to switch to a new provider in the next 12 months”! This potential churn should be alarming to any cloud-oriented service provider. The people that buy your service and keep you in business are not happy and looking to leave because they are saying they can’t get what they need from you!

But that also means OPPORTUNITY!

Those same customers also told us what they want to be fixed (or why they’re seeking to leave):

What else did we learn from MSP/CSP customers?

Areas customers believe cloud-orient service providers can have a positive impact:

83% agree that it is important for service providers to embrace sustainability.

How much time, effort, and money would you have spent chasing answers to these questions? Luckily, we already have them – and they are available to you for free and without any obligation on your part. Just download your free copy of this important new research and listen to what customers are saying. The MSPs/CSPs who do will win…big. Those who refuse to pay attention do so at their own peril.

And once you clearly understand what companies are saying they want, be sure to talk to CloudBolt about the expanded capabilities you need. We can help you help your customers to orchestrate, optimize, protect, and accelerate multi-cloud results by bringing order to the chaos they are experiencing. Unlock new revenue opportunities with CloudBolt. Learn More

As organizations mature along their hybrid cloud journey, many seek to diversify their clouds and tools to take advantage of best of breed options, reduce vendor lock-in, and allow preferences among different organizational groups. In our recent research, we’ve found that over half of IT leaders believe providing an ability to choose best of breed for specific current functions is why it’s important to diversify beyond a single public cloud provider.

The problems arise when you need to manage, optimize, orchestrate, and automate among a growing set of clouds and tools. Organizations don’t want to travel between multiple consoles just to maintain a stable environment. They don’t want to aggregate cloud spends in spreadsheets utilizing native platform tools. They don’t have the time and resources to build and maintain integrations among all tools so they can automate and orchestrate to be more efficient. Our research shows 6% have workloads only hosted in a single cloud. 80% have up to 50% of their workloads hosted in a multi-cloud environment.

Organizations want to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) but they also want to use Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). They want to use Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes and whatever comes next! They want to seamlessly switch between Cloud Management Platform (CMPs) and even deploy one to replace another.

Customer aspirations have out-paced technology…. Until now!

CloudBolt Software announces its Summer ’21 release today featuring new capabilities to its award-wining cloud management, cost management, and codeless integration solutions. These include comprehensive GCP support, rich multi-cloud budgeting and cost trending insights, and a robust API framework for greater automation flexibility. We also added support for even more IT automation tools (e.g., VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) Cloud, ServiceNow, Ansible Tower, etc.) to help enterprises reduce custom integration headaches as they invest in more tools for hybrid cloud.

What is in each release and how does it help in a multi-cloud/tool world?

Cloud cost management enhancements

New cost optimization for GCP – CloudBolt’s cost management platform now supports GCP, building on the product’s richness for AWS, Azure, and VMware. As the only vendor employing automation for cost control, CloudBolt can now continuously notify FinOps of real-time cost saving opportunities, while providing a single pane of glass for public cloud optimization across all the major hyperscalers.

New budgeting capabilities for FinOps teams – Summer ‘21 new capabilities make FinOps teams even more effective across all hyperscale environments. This includes the ability to create monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets; understand historical cost trends to avoid surprise cloud bills; real-time alerts when spend thresholds are reached; and improved currency conversion to support global needs. Also, the new currency conversion feature helps global enterprises to convert currencies using the approved currency ratios for simplified invoicing and financial transparency.

Watch CSMP Summer Release ’21 Highlights Video – Read CSMP Release Notes

Cloud management platform enhancements – CMP 9.4.6

Enhanced GCP management and visibility – Summer ’21 provides ITOps team with a single place for all things Google (e.g., Google servers, Google Storage Cloud, etc.). This includes comprehensive visibility into your GCP servers (e.g., CPU, memory, etc.); ease of tagging of GCP resources (e.g. by groups, users) for better monitoring and visibility; and improved blueprints for faster self-service of Google Storage Cloud. 

New API v3 framework for improved flexibility – Summer ’21 introduces a new API v3 framework for CloudBolt enabling even greater automation flexibility for ITOps and DevOps teams. This approach simplifies resource provisioning and management using CloudBolt API integration with a third-party system such as ServiceNow, Terraform, etc.

Enhanced multi-tenancy support – CloudBolt now supports enhanced multi-tenancy, enabling MSPs and global enterprises, in particular, to better control and manage their hybrid cloud across different customers, regions, and user groups.

Watch CMP Summer Release ’21 Highlights Video – Read CMP Release Notes

Codeless integration enhancements – OneFuse v1.4

New codeless integration support—OneFuse v1.4 brings two new downstream integration modules to popular IT services: Microsoft IPAM, and F5 BIG-IP. It also offers new platform support for Ansible, ServiceNow, VMware vRA Cloud, and CloudBolt CMP, significantly improving integrations to and from these management platforms.

New pluggable modules—In prior versions of OneFuse, you had to update the entire application to add new integrations or support for new platforms. In OneFuse v1.4, we introduce ‘Pluggable Modules’ where you can easily add or update existing modules without an upgrade. This saves customer time and risk by avoiding an entire application upgrade.

Watch OneFuse Summer Release ’21 Highlights Video – Read OneFuse Release Notes

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.