Infrastructure gets written off as table stakes, but if you’ve actually shipped software, you know how much pain comes from the friction between layers of the stack. In this RedMonk Conversation, Rachel Stephens sits down with Jay Thontakudi, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Broadcom, to dig into why the partnership between VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and Canonical is more than “Linux runs on VMware.”

The conversation gets at a problem most enterprises quietly live with: developers build on Ubuntu, then watch their code land on a different Linux distribution in staging and production. Jay and Rachel talk through what it means to close that gap, and why treating the hypervisor and the OS as one supported thing rather than two vendors pointing fingers is as much a security story as it is a developer experience one.

For additional information please visit:

• https://vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vmware-cloud-foundation
• https://canonical.com

This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by VMware by Broadcom.

Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
02:06 – What is VCF?
03:55 – The Broadcom & Canonical Partnership
05:58 – Why Ubuntu? Bridging the Dev-to-Production Disconnect
08:18 – Security & Stability: A Unified Stack and Support Model
10:12 – Why Developer Experience is Security
11:21 – VMware’s Open Source Strategy
15:24 – Conclusion & Upcoming Technical Deep Dive

Transcript

Rachel Stephens (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to RedMonk Conversations. My name is Rachel Stephens and I am the research director with RedMonk and with me today I have Jay Thontakudi. He is a principal product marketing manager with Broadcom. I’m excited today because together we’re going to unpack how pairing the VCF platform with the Ubuntu operating systems helps enterprises with their application delivery and modernization. Jay, can you give us just a quick overview on who you are and what you do with Broadcom?

Jay Thontakudi (00:32)
Yeah, Rachel, glad to be here with you in this conversation. Again, for our listeners, Jay Thontakudi. I am a principal product marketing manager in the VCF division here in Broadcom. My primary area of responsibility is product marketing for all things Kubernetes, which is available through our vSphere Kubernetes service, also involved in CNCF projects where we are contributors.

And in addition, I also focus on the Broadcom Canonical partnership. I’ve been in VMware for six years. Prior to that, I spent a couple of decades with Cisco Systems, focusing on building next generation platforms like routers and switches. But I started my career in the IT side, working for Shell Oil Company in the IP backbone team, writing Cron jobs and maintaining scripts.

to build automation tools for the technologies that were at our disposal at that time. Of course, a lot of those scripts have made it into rudimentary functions with the automation tools that are available today.

Rachel Stephens (01:33)
We always say we got to automate ourselves out of jobs. you have platformed yourself out of a job, I guess. All right. So before we get too far, I want to make sure that everyone starts off by even understanding what VCF is. think people are probably fairly familiar with vSphere. That’s kind of been in market for a very long time and is probably at least widely understood as a brand. I’m not sure VCF is quite as commonly understood in our industry of acronyms. So let’s just make sure we kick off with an introduction to what the platform is.

Jay Thontakudi (02:06)
Yeah, so VCF stands for VMware Cloud Foundation. It’s a leading private cloud platform that enables customers to deploy all workloads, be it containerized, modern workloads, AI workloads, traditional VM-based workloads, to run side by side with the management and operational consistency. Now, VCF incorporates all the experience and capabilities that have been developed over

20 years of innovation with vSphere. But what it also brings to the table is a built-in runtime Kubernetes delivered through a service called vSphere Kubernetes Service, or VKS. Now VKS includes the upstream, conformant, CNCF certified Kubernetes that enables customers to deploy all their modern applications and take advantage of the latest innovations in open source.

So you can basically say we have a social contract with our customers and with our CNCF community partners to enable customers to bring any application that has been deployed on other certified platforms over to VCF. And the principles are very simple. You build your application once and you deploy it anywhere. Now apart from VKS, VCF also includes other services like Private AI Service to deploy Private AI workloads.

Rachel Stephens (03:19)
Okay, cool.

Jay Thontakudi (03:29)
VM service for VM workloads, network services, and we incorporate all these services and provide the ability to offer centralized policy management that makes governance and compliance much easier. We also provide lifecycle management for multi-cluster deployments. So what you’re looking at is an open extensible platform that is enterprise-ready, scalable, and robust.

Rachel Stephens (03:55)
And dual run times for VMs and Kubernetes. Very cool. All right. But what we’re specifically going to talk about today is the partnership that you all announced at your conference last August. The conference is called VMware Explore and you announced a partnership with Canonical.

Jay Thontakudi (03:58)
Absolutely.

Rachel Stephens (04:12)
Canonical is the publisher of the extremely popular operating system Ubuntu. But if the interesting part of your announcement isn’t just a “Linux runs on VMware,” that’s table stakes.

the question then is what makes this partnership interesting and exciting and why are we delving into it today?

Jay Thontakudi (04:28)
It’s good point to bring up. With VCF, our focus has always been to reduce friction in deploying modern workloads. And while doing so, ensuring that the environment is secure and hardened. What we saw with the Canonical partnership is an opportunity for us to further accelerate the modern workload deployments, enhance security, and improve operational efficiency.

So what we are doing with this partnership is providing a streamlined experience for our customers who are looking at Ubuntu OS as the environment in which they want to build their applications and deploy it on VCF as the enterprise grade platform. And the best part of all this is the optimized Ubuntu images that we bring with VCF is available for free.

for our VCF customers who already have a VCF license.

Rachel Stephens (05:24)
at RedMonk, we talk a lot about developer experience and we care a lot about what it is like to actually use a technology as the person with your hands on the keyboard. And Ubuntu is one of the

operating systems for developers to use. And I’m wondering if we can talk about this. So we kind of talk about it from a developer side. Let’s also talk about it from a platform engineer side. How does running VCF and Ubuntu help platform engineers make a developer’s life easier?

And how do we make sure that this is something that’s a meaningful shift and not just infrastructure level changes that kind of gets abstracted away and doesn’t matter to the end user?

Jay Thontakudi (05:58)
So I think you bring up an important point from a

engineering perspective, right? They will see the benefits of this integration. Now, VCF optimized Ubuntu OS image treats the hypervisor layer and the

system layer as a single unified stack. Now, with this approach, platform engineers get a streamlined experience and integrated support from Broadcom.

as the single point of contact. So instead of left shifting the complexities that are pretty common when you’re dealing with multiple layers, we are completely eliminating it. So from a developer perspective, they get the velocity and trust they so desire. And from a platform engineering perspective, they get the benefit of accelerated deployments for their modern applications. Now, the important question in this exercise is why Ubuntu OS?

And you alluded to in your observation earlier, what we see is that Ubuntu OS is one of the most widely adopted operating system by developers and data scientists. But in many organizations, while the development is taking place with Ubuntu OS, the moment these applications hit staging or production, they are dealing with different Linux distributions. It is this classic disconnect between the different environments.

that this integration seeks to eliminate. By providing a consistent environment from code to the cluster, from development to production, we are able to reduce the friction in deploying modern applications. And one of the additional benefits by taking this approach that customers get is that we reduce the number of Linux distributions that are in use, and as a result, we reduce the attack surface.

Rachel Stephens (07:45)
I love that.

And I think

you lay that out, it has cost benefits, operational benefits, all of those things are great. let’s dive into security more.

because I think that’s one of the things that is a key selling point of the VCF platform overall is the way that you try to talk about governance and compliance. So how does this partnership help the long-term stability and compliance of a private cloud environment? And how do you think that this all ties together with user experience?

Jay Thontakudi (08:18)
Sure, I think it’s a good point. When we talk about user experience, we obviously can’t leave out certain facets of what that experience looks like. With this partnership, our customers get five years of enterprise support from Broadcom. So if something fails in the kernel or you have some kind of a problem at the hypervisor level, you don’t have two vendors pointing fingers at each other. So from the customer perspective, you get that integrated enterprise support from Broadcom.

as the single point of contact. And for platform engineers, this is a peace of mind. Also, customers can take advantage of the patching efficiency that Canonical brings to the table for addressing critical and high vulnerabilities. So in the VCF platform itself, we have six levels of fault isolation and cyber resiliency.

Added to that, now with the operating system and the efficiency that Canonical brings to the table, it definitely provides a very robust and resilient infrastructure for customers to develop their applications and deploy them in a production environment. And in case, I mean, we talk about five years of ⁓ support from Broadcom. So in situations where customers need additional support, let’s say 10 years or 15 years, they can easily upgrade to

Rachel Stephens (09:26)
Okay.

Jay Thontakudi (09:38)
the licenses that Canonical makes available for additional duration of support.

Rachel Stephens (09:44)
One of the things that I want to add on here is one of the pieces that I have written is “Developer Experience is Security.” And the crux of this argument is you need to make the

safe thing to do, the thing that developers are going to do. So kind of combine the path of making the right thing and the easy thing the same thing. And it sounds like this is another example of trying to, by improving usability for developers, you’re also adding a layer of security for the platform at large.

Jay Thontakudi (10:12)
You’re right, Rachel. And actually, it’s an important point, right? Our platform is secure by design. And any element we incorporate, we also follow the same paradigm to see that the constituent elements are secure by design. And in your article, you mention

fact that while we left shift security,

to where it is incorporated in design when you’re developing the application. It is also important that the tools that are used by the developers, by the users, also have the notion of security built in. This is exactly what we do with our solution. And as we go into more details about the ecosystem of services, there is another point I’ll be able to bring up where we talk about the tools that also have inherent security consciousness.

to help build the layers of defense that are essential today.

Rachel Stephens (11:05)
Well, let’s actually just dive right into that ecosystem question then. let’s talk about your community strategy and how you are upstreaming your Kubernetes VCF9 releases. And what does that relationship look like with the CNCF? And how does that relationship with Canonical fit into all of this open ecosystem?

Jay Thontakudi (11:21)
Broadcom has been a

to CNCF projects. In fact, we are one among the top five contributors. And our focus in contributing to the CNCF community has been in three areas. One is reliability, lifecycle management, and security. So our engineers are contributors and maintainers of some of the key projects like etcd Cluster API, and Harbor.

And when I made the point about having that security consciousness or security hygiene in the cloud services tools, Harbor is a classic example where Harbor actually scans for viruses in the images that are pulled by the

services. So because you have this built-in capability, you are able to prevent a supply chain attack.

This is just an example of what you highlight in your article about left shifting security, but at the same time making sure the tools that surround it also have security built in. Now, going beyond just the contributions we make to CNCF, I mentioned that VKS is upstream compliant and CNCF certified. So,

Customers can build their application once and deploy it anywhere. So if

running on other certified platforms, they can be easily migrated or ported over to VKS. Whether a customer has, let’s say, GitLab, GitHub, or ArgoCD, FluxCD for their CI-CD pipeline, they are using Harbor or Artifactory for their registry services, Helm for Manifest.

Whatever is the ecosystem, the customers are operating in VKS can actually plug into that ecosystem. And we are continuing to broaden this ecosystem. For example, in the latest release of VKS, we have introduced a native CNI plugin, which gives flexibility and choice to add partner add-ons. And then this is just about VCF that I have mentioned. Our partner, Canonical,

also significantly contributes to CNCF, and they are a major contributor to Debian, which is the open source Linux distribution. So Canonical builds their Ubuntu OS using Debian as the upstream conformant distribution. So not only do they contribute to Debian, but they also leverage or benefit from the Debian distribution.

From a customer perspective, what this means is this partnership brings the combined advantages of open source innovations delivered on an enterprise ready platform with VCF. So customers can accelerate their application deployments, making it faster, easier, and more secure.

Rachel Stephens (14:16)
So if I were going to sum up our conversation, the partnership between Broadcom and Canonical is all about bringing usability and

secure by design tooling to both the developers and the platform teams. Anything else that you want to make sure that we all take away from this?

Jay Thontakudi (14:31)
No, the good news is this VCF optimized Ubuntu OS image is available for our customers who have active VCF subscription. They can download the images from our solution catalog. We started our integration with the Ubuntu OS image version 22.04, which is the LTS image. We also have 24.04 image that is available for customers.

And we plan to do a technical deep dive on this integration on the RedMonk platform. We have a RedMonk webinar that is coming up So we ask our listeners to stay tuned for that webinar where we’ll actually show a demo of what this experience looks like. we have a set of sites that you can go to and read up on VCF, VKS, and also the private AI services.

Rachel Stephens (15:24)
Wonderful. Well, this has been such a fun conversation. Jay, thank you for coming on and thank you for sharing all the exciting updates you have brewing over at Broadcom and sharing ways that people can remove friction in their developer experience and productivity in private cloud.

Jay Thontakudi (15:39)
Thank you very much, Rachel. Thanks for your time.

Rachel Stephens (15:42)
Thank you.