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VMware’s Project Pacific: A Stroke of Genius?

If you haven’t heard, VMware has been making some big waves at VMworld 2019 with their announcement of Project Pacific. As predicted, Kubernetes is the name of the game, and it’s clear that VMware is signaling their intent to jump on the Kubernetes freight train and ride it all the way. But what does this mean for IT Operations (IT Ops) and Developers (Devs)? And how does it stack up against public clouds?

The premise of Project Pacific is to use Kubernetes to manage workloads via declarative specifications. Essentially, IT Ops and Devs can tell vSphere what they want, and it will deploy and manage the infrastructure that serves as a platform for their applications. This is all about the application! By abstracting all infrastructure and most of the platform, Kubernetes becomes the control plane for vSphere.

So, what’s the catch? With 70 million workloads across 500,000+ customers, VMware is thinking that with this functionality in place, the current movement of refactoring workloads to take advantage of cloud-native constructs like containers, serverless, or Kubernetes doesn’t need to happen. Existing workloads instantly become first-class citizens on Kubernetes. Interesting theory!

However, I believe that the world of Kubernetes and containers is better placed to be consumed on public clouds. The scale and immediacy of Kubernetes platforms on Google, Azure, or AWS without the need to procure hardware and install software mean that this model of consumption will still have an advantage over something like Project Pacific.

But here’s where things get interesting. By combining “traditional” workloads with Kubernetes as its control plane within vSphere, the single, declarative, self-service experience that it potentially offers might stop IT Operations from moving to public clouds. But is that enough to stop developers from forcing their hands? It’s going to be very interesting to see this in action and how well it’s ultimately received!

The videos below give a good level of technical background into Project Pacific, while Frank also has an introductory post here, while Kit Colbert’s VMworld session is linked in the references.

References:

https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2019/videoplayer/28407

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