VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona – The Highlights

VMware Explore Barcelona 2023 is a wrap and I’m back at home with a lot of news regarding the company merging with Broadcom, the new announcements, and new product features. I was mainly involved in some community activities and I had a lot of conversations with VMware staff and vendor eco-systems. And now it’s time to share news and perspectives.

VMware and Broadcom: the wait is ended!

Probably the most “rumored” topic of the year is the state of company merging which is taking the necessary time to overcome financials and organizational issues (definitely not my space).

Technically speaking there are three main pillars where Hock E. Tan (President, CEO, and director of Broadcom) is reassuring VMware will continue to work:

• Innovation: Accelerate R&D
• Eco-system: More investments helping partners to improve customer support
• Operation: simplifying VMware’s adoption and experience

 

 

So these good vibes felt during the keynote and during the Europe VMUG leaders gathering (got the chance to meet Hock Tan there), should keep away the specter of the “dismemberment” of the most important virtualization company in the world!

So, the next weeks are crucial and I’m looking forward to hearing something (positive) coming from the company itself but also from the community inside and outside the company.

In the meantime, on the 21st of November 2023, Broadcom announced the completion of the acquisition (link to official announcements).

Private AI

For sure this is the buzzword of the event but also the buzzword of the year or better the buzzword of the last period and here I’d like to demystify some of the misconceptions that are pervading a lot of “social” conversation when the topic is AI. This is definitely not the end of man-made things, this is another important human evolution step to solve some other repetitive tasks and accelerate/simplify the ways we’re doing things every day.

I mean, there’s no “judgment day” like sci-fi literature is prophecying due to the use and abuse of Artificial Intelligence; the purpose of AI in my case, is to help infrastructure operations and for sure none aims to delegate AI to press the “red button” to initiate the disaster recovery process. In my opinion, automation is not supposed to not be used to make critical decisions instead of human operators but could be the chance for humans to make better decisions by getting more information about what is happening and how the disaster could evolve. This is the purpose of Private AI: no critical data can go outside the data center and there’s a “tireless personal assistant” to help you manage workloads.

 

 

During the last event, VMware announced some strategic partnerships with GPU vendors in order to accelerate the adoption of AI:

1. Intel Partnership
2. IBM WatsonX
3. Data service partnership
4. The continuation of the NVIDIA partnership

Here you can find the official announcement post regarding this topic.

Announcements in Cloud-Native Space from Vegas to Barcelona

This is definitely my subject! Since the beginning of the Tanzu journey, I’ve seen a lot of improvements and announcements. During the keynote session, Raghu Raghuram announced some cool features in cloud-native space and here I want to highlight two of them that I found most valuable:

Tanzu Application Engine introduces an application-centric layer to allow applications to run with consistent operational governance. Checking the official announcement <<Developers will be able to focus on their applications without worrying about infrastructure details, platform engineers will be able to focus on managing and operating infrastructure at scale, and operators will be able to define configurations to meet organizational governance and compliance requirements>>. This should be a further step toward reducing the gap between the developers’ methodology and cloud-native deployment. VMware announced this topic during VMware Explore in Las Vegas and now is available as Tech Preview.

 

 

Tanzu Developer Portal is an internal developer portal in the Tanzu Application Platform. This integration is based on Backstage and helps to simplify the development team organization. In a few words: this could be the definitive single pane of glass to handle the software lifecycle and the contribution by the organizations. For further, check the Vegas’ announcement: https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer-portal

The list of all announcements is available here: https://www.vmware.com/vmware-explore-new.html

…And this is only the beginning! I’ll talk about news and community moments, especially about the VMware {code} Hackathon that deserves an entire post.

So, stay tuned, and for Italian folks, I’ll suggest taking a look at “ThePipelineGuys” special episode for VMware Explore Barcelona 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I87nUcSdGoU&list=PLMUF__05moOXQrcKhEuWvWJPI3y2sPv9L