Rachel Stephens sits down with Audrey Bian, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Broadcom, to explore how vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) is helping enterprises modernize their applications without rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch. Audrey breaks down how VKS bridges the gap between traditional VM workloads and modern containerized applications on a single unified platform.

For additional information please visit https://vmware.com/vks.

This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by VMware by Broadcom.

Topics covered:

• What is VKS and how does it the VMware stack?
• Cloud admins vs. platform engineers
• VKS and TCO
• What’s new in VKS 3.6?

Transcript

Rachel Stephens (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to the MonkCast. I’m Rachel Stephens and with me today I have Audrey Bian. She’s a Principal Product Marketing Manager with Broadcom. Audrey is the PMM for vSphere Kubernetes Service or VKS. And today we’re going to be talking about how she helps teams simplify their Kubernetes journey. Audrey, could you please introduce us to who you are and share a little bit more about what you do with Broadcom?

Audrey Bian (00:26)
Sounds great. Thank you, Rachel. Hi, everyone. My name is Audrey Bian. I am a principal product and marketing manager at VMware, now part of Broadcom. So I’ve been with the company for seven years. Actually, this month is my seven-year anniversary month with the company. ⁓ I started with hyperscaler solutions, and now I focus on vSphere Kubernetes service.

Rachel Stephens (00:50)
And I think one of the things that can be tricky for people who do not follow the VMware portfolio closely is that there have been evolutions in names and packaging, and especially in our industry of three letter acronyms. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all of the changes. So for people who are maybe not familiar with VKS, let’s set a baseline. I’d love for you to help us run through what exactly is VKS, where does it sit within the VMware

more stack and what are the specific unsolved problems that you are trying to help solve in the enterprise.

Audrey Bian (01:23)
Yeah, that sounds great, Rachel. So at a high level of vSphere Kubernetes service, we go with VKS. It’s VMware’s enterprise Kubernetes runtime that we built directly into VMware Cloud Foundation, which is VCF. So VCF is our unified private cloud platform that bridge library, compute, storage, networking, and cloud services all together in a single platform. So what VKS does here is

it brings the fully conformant Kubernetes. So organizations, they can run modern containerized applications and the traditional enterprise workloads on the same platform. So the problem we are solving today is there are so many enterprises today, they are operating like two separate platforms, such as like one for traditional VMs and another one for Kubernetes platforms for modern apps.

which means they need to get like new infrastructure, new tours, new operational systems. That fragmentation creates just operational complexity and this slows down the application delivery.

So with VKS, as we can see from this slide here in the box, we provide open source services to our customers and also extendable for like third party.

services as well. It basically bridged a gap that platform engineers they can provide. They are provided with self-service while also continue to use the same infrastructure, security policies and operational tooling. They already trust in the VCF environment. Basically, our goal is very simple to help enterprises modernize their applications faster without forcing them into

rebuilds their infrastructure or operational practices from scratch.

Rachel Stephens (03:20)
Wonderful. And you started to actually inch towards my next question.

one of the things that we talk about a lot at RedMonk is that different personas within the enterprise experience technologies differently. So the experience of using Kubernetes is not monolithic across all the different users. And it’s a different experience depending on where you sit in the org chart. It seems like you have different personas in mind based off of how you’re starting to talk about this, but can you give us a breakdown of the personas you’re building this product for?

Audrey Bian (03:49)
Yes, happy to.

Let me go to the next slide. So there are three key personas we will talk about today. There are like first decision makers, like a CEO, CTO, and the platform engineers. The last is our cloud admin.

Rachel Stephens (04:05)
Okay, let’s pause and interject. What is a cloud admin versus a platform engineer?

Audrey Bian (04:11)
Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, our customer also asked a lot of these questions.

Can help me to like differentiate these key personas? So a VCF model, Cloud Admins and Platform Engineers, basically, they operate at different layers of the stack. So for Cloud Admins, they are more focusing on running the underlying infrastructure, such as compute storage networking and the lifecycle management of the VCF platform. So for

Platform engineers then they build on top of that infrastructure to create a developer platform. So such as we’re using services like VKS to provide like self-service infrastructure, modern Kubernetes and a standardized environment and automation for application teams. So you can think of the cloud admins they operating the cloud and a platform engineers they enabling.

developers to build and deploy their applications on it.

Rachel Stephens (05:10)
given that the people in all these roles will have different day concerns, especially if we’re kind of differentiating between practitioners and the decision makers, let’s maybe dive in a little bit more. So if we start with the cloud admins that we just went into, they’ve spent a decade or more kind of mastering the vSphere universe. What is the actual quality of life benefit that they have by having VKS baked into VCF rather than managing Kubernetes as like a separate entity?

Audrey Bian (05:40)
Yeah, that’s a great question, Rachel.

here I have a slide for you. In this slide, we’re going to highlight what’s in it for our Cloud admins. The first is unified platform, like I mentioned earlier, for VMs and containers so customers can run traditional and modern workloads on a single VCF platform with consistent operations and fewer infrastructure silos. And also the second part is a simplified Kubernetes operations.

As we all know, Cloud Admin they a lot of them coming from the VR admins. So because of the unified set of the APIs we offer, so Cloud Admin they now can provide to provision upgrade and scale Kubernetes using very similar VMware workflow and existing infrastructure skills. And also I want to mention, help them to change their career path and without too much of the learning curve.

And then the third part is the centralized governance and policy control. Basically, it enforces the security, compliance, and operational standards while also enable our team to move faster. We also support the multiple Kubernetes versions in each release. So our teams, are not forced to upgrade in like a fixed time. They can stay in version as long as they want and the works for the team.

and upgrade as they are ready. The last but not least is we have very strong workload isolations because it built on the

isolation, which improves the

and also protect against

Rachel Stephens (07:22)
I love that because there’s then benefits for them career-wise, there’s benefits for them adopting new technology, and there’s benefits for the org overall. All right, so let’s move on to platform engineers. These generally are folks who are trying to build like an internal development platform for their developers so that the developers don’t have to think so much about the tooling and can deploy with ease. If I’m

Audrey Bian (07:30)
Exactly.

Rachel Stephens (07:45)
platform engineer, why would I be looking at VKS as a foundation and how does that help me versus other Kubernetes deployment options?

Audrey Bian (07:55)
Yeah, so basically, because we provided the enterprise Kubernetes platform, like I mentioned earlier, Rachel, which we have this fully CNCF certified and integrated directly into the VCF. So it allows our team to quickly spin up Kubernetes clusters with flexible version support and extended a 24-month lifecycle support, which reduces upgrade.

pressure and customers they get the same level of support for 24 months, which is the longest in the industry. And also integrates with common platform engineer tools like Argo CD, Helm for GitOps workloads. So on top of that, also VKS we provide the multi cluster management, like policy and a backup at a scale, along with the consistent API across the VMs.

Kubernetes and services like private AI. So team, can operate everything from a single platform.

Rachel Stephens (08:57)
the open source project is releasing new things every six months. So for organizations that can be really hard to keep up with.

Audrey Bian (09:04)
Yes, and also I want to mention we also go where every four months we have a new VKS release. We want to make sure our platform teams they are stay on top of the innovation.

Rachel Stephens (09:20)
And last but not least, let’s talk about these kind of IT and executive decision makers, what appeals to them about the VKS platform.

Audrey Bian (09:27)
So ⁓ I think for a lot of decision makers, the top priority is the TCO. So we help organizations to modernize the applications. Also at the same time, we try to lower the TCO as low as possible. Because the reason we mentioned, they don’t need two separate platforms anymore. They can run VMs in containers on the same infrastructure.

Eliminating the silos and also reducing the license cost, operational overhead, all of these lead to a lower TCO for our decision makers. And the second one is fast time to value. So basically, VCF enables a faster application delivery, so organizations, they can move from idea to productions more quickly, which means like projects they deliver

value sooner and start producing our ROIs earlier. The third part, I think all the decision makers, they all care about is the security and compliance. You know, it means like better protection and in VCF we have also we emphasize on these six layers of isolation for VMs and containers, which minimize the noisy neighborhood issues, which happens a lot on bare metal.

And also data in VCF is encrypted end to end and both at risk and intrinsic. At the same time, it’s also reduced the Kubernetes skill gap. Like I mentioned earlier, Rachel, like the same API, we allow a team to use familiar VMware tools and it’s backed by our strong open source leadership with Broadcom as a top contributor in the CNCF ecosystem.

Rachel Stephens (11:19)
And I think that maybe that’s not fully appreciated how much VMware is contributing back to the upstream.

Audrey Bian (11:26)
Yeah, as a VMware has always been the top five contributors to the open source. And I think we need to emphasize that a lot more.

Rachel Stephens (11:37)
let’s close Audrey by talking about some of the features that you’ve shipped in your latest release. I think it is VKS 3.6, so let’s hear more about that.

Audrey Bian (11:44)
Yes.

Yeah, the release just came out last month. So we are very excited about this release. There are three key pillars here. We talk about networking flexibility, optimized performance, and also we offer enterprise OS choices for our customers. So let’s maybe take a quick look on each pillar. In the first pillar, we are giving platform engineers support for partner-provided CNIs.

such as Isovolent Cilium and Calico Enterprise from Tigera So ⁓ why this is important is because in our earlier releases, VKS standard package include only like two built-in CNI options.

Antrea and Calico. So customers, could choose between them,

but the networking models was a little bit like fixed. So with VK3.6, we made a foundational changes. Our built-in CNIs are now delivered as add-on, and we introduced new variables in this built-in cluster class that allows our customer to select which CNIs they want to use at their customer creation time.

and we will keep adding more options for our customers. And in the second pillar, we want to communicate to our customers is that advanced kernel level tuning use TuneD profiles, which allows our platform engineers to optimize Kubernetes nodes for performance critical workloads without they don’t need to manually change it from the OS level.

So the key idea here is that the TuneD profiles are managed declaratively by our VKS control plan. Instead of like manually tuning individual nodes or relying on Kubernetes defaults, customers now they can define the policy-driven kernel configurations and apply them consistently across the clusters.

so the third pillar is our customer now they can bring their Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL cluster nodes in EKS. So they can leverage existing their real investment like skills.

and security toolings. So this is very important because it allows our customer to reuse their OS investment and operational expertise instead of forcing into a migration to a more like fixed OS choices for our customers.

Rachel Stephens (14:23)
It sounds like you all have been very busy. So it sounds like if you are a cloud admin, a platform engineer, or a technology decision maker, the VKS team has a story that they would love to tell you. So if people are interested in hearing more, where should they go?

Audrey Bian (14:39)
⁓ I think the best way is to go to our webpage. Actually, we have a very easy to remember link. It’s vmware.com slash vks.

Rachel Stephens (14:50)
Okay, wonderful. Audrey, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Audrey Bian (14:56)
Same here, it’s a pleasure. Thank you, Rachel.