In the last few years we collectively spent an outrageous amount of time talking and arguing about the “per VM” cost of running workloads on-prem Vs. running workloads in a public cloud. While doing so, we forgot to take into account the elephant in the room: the (upside down) economics of (some) public clouds. The …

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You try to convey a concept but it’s only when something (else) happens that people have their “Aha moment”. Last year VMware introduced a project called Bonneville that later became vSphere Integrated Containers. Having recently moved to the VMware Cloud Native Application Business Unit, working on Bonneville and VIC …

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A few days ago we had a great friend of mine over for dinner. He also happened to be my very first mentor at IBM (when I joined back in 1994) and one of the smartest guys I have ever met. A few years ago he decided to unplug from the IT industry and has only recently rejoined the mad-house. Since he was so smart, it …

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Last year I wrote a blog post whose title was "Cloud Native Applications for Dummies" that was apparently well received. On the same line, I'd like to do something similar for the average Joe when it comes to DevOps (whatever that means). The CNA post was about the taxonomy of a cloud application. This blog …

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Two years ago I joined the VMware Cloud Services Business Unit working on vCloud Air because I sensed there was a shift going on in the industry. I referred to that change as a growing personal interest to learn more about how to consume IT Vs. how to build IT. I still very much stand behind that statement as I think, …

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In the last few weeks I have seen some discussions and requests around using fog.io ("The Ruby cloud services library") in the context of vCloud Air. The short story is that it works just fine. The long story is below. If you are reading this post you may be interested in this combo (fog and vCloud Air) so I …

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In the last year or so I have focused primarily on vCloud Air API and Automation. As a mere exercise I have been working on some code that I am making available today: https://github.com/mreferre/vcautils. In the README on Github you can read everything about it, so I am not going to repeat myself (too much) in this …

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I have just heard of a massive outage that a localized IaaS Cloud Service Provider is experiencing: they have been down (at the time I am drafting this short blog post) 4 days and counting. When I get to publish this it may be they have been down 4 days or... god knows. Apparently the issue was due to a firmware bug in …

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post whose title was Cloud Native Applications (for Dummies). While I don't want to claim that that was my masterpiece, I have received some positive feedbacks about it. So let's say we all agree on how a 'Cloud Native Applications' looks (or should look) like. There are two major events that …

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There have been attempts lately to describe "modern applications" or "modern workloads". A good attempt is The Twelve-Factor App. It's a great way to describe such workloads but I think those concepts would need to be dumbed down an order of magnitude to get the average Joe to digest them properly. …

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