Broadcom upgraded its metal status with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), an upgrade that builds on recent moves by the vendor to expand its presence in the open-source community.
Broadcom is now a CNCF “Platinum” member, which is achieve by an increased investment into the cloud native-focused organization. Others in that tier include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle.
Broadcom tied the “expanded investment in CNCF” to “its ongoing commitment to open-source collaboration and the technologies enabling organizations to build and operate modern application platforms,” with a specific mention of enterprises increasingly moving “AI and data-intensive workloads into production.”
“Cloud native adoption has moved well beyond application deployment and now encompasses platform operations, resilience, security, and life cycle management,” Dilpreet Bindra, senior director of engineering for Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division, noted in a statement. “By advancing our membership to Platinum, we’re helping fortify the open technologies teams depend on to operate Kubernetes environments with confidence. We are pleased to continue to uplift the cloud native community and supporting the technologies that enable organizations to help organizations modernize their platforms, protect critical workloads and accelerate innovation.”
CNCF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce also pointed to Broadcom’s recent contribution of projects like Velero, which entered CNCF’s “Sandbox” ecosystem earlier this year. That project was begun in early 2019 as an open-source tool for Kubernetes, providing backup, recovery, and migration for Kubernetes clusters and persistent volumes. It operates at the Kubernetes API layer and basically provides a data storage pocket for Kubernetes-orchestrated containers to allow those containers to support stateful applications.
“Broadcom has had a longstanding engagement with CNCF and is committed to supporting the future of cloud native computing as the technology where AI runs,” Bryce noted. “From contributing projects like Velero to helping organizations operate complex cloud native environments, Broadcom plays an important role in the ecosystem.”
Broadcom has also been a long-term contributor to the CNCF ecosystem, including as one of the top contributors to the Kubernetes project, and has originated other projects like Harbor, Antrea, and Contour.
Broadcom’s open-source options #
Broadcom’s CNCF metal update highlights the vendor’s continuing adjustments to its cloud-native and Kubernetes efforts in the market.
The vendor currently offers a pair of platforms targeted at this space: VKS and Tanzu.
Operationally, VKS is VMware’s Kubernetes runtime and orchestration service that is included in VCF. It stands apart from the vendor’s Tanzu platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that allows users to run applications regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
Broadcom’s VKS platform late last year garnered a gold star from the CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program. That program was established to level-set expectations for AI workloads running in Kubernetes-managed container environments.
Tanzu itself gained updates last year tied to last year’s VMware Explore event, though Broadcom CEO Hock Tan spoke more broadly during that event about how VKS was supportive of the vendor’s VCF platform. Purnima Padmanabhan, VP and GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, spun that focus toward “Hock’s theory” that “if he doesn’t win the private cloud, all the castles we build on top of private cloud will come crashing down.”
This meant Tan had to “strip out everything and made it purely a private cloud show so that he could create feedback on private cloud,” Padmanabhan said.
Regardless of the channel, Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing for Broadcom’s VCF division, noted during a press briefing earlier this year that Broadcom has continued VMware’s traditional open-source community support, stating the vendor “was among the top-five long-term contributors to the Kubernetes community.”
“Open source is a big part of our identity,” Shenoy added. “We're not only the consumers of these projects, but active contributors to the project to help simplify Kubernetes operations, increase resiliency, enhance security, etc.”
Despite the ongoing support, Gartner last year did ding Broadcom’s cloud-native offerings, noting that the vendor’s “broader portfolio remains muddled,” and clients “continue to express confusion over repeated changes” as to how VMware was offering its services, with some concerned about “if and how the different offerings are integrated.”
Gartner added that to stay competitive in the container space, Broadcom “must successfully add value that differentiates its container solutions from its cloud partners, software competitors, and hosted/managed container services.”
It should be noted that Gartner’s comments were before Broadcom’s most recent cloud-native moves.
Open source exit opportunities #
Broadcom’s CNCF upgrade also comes as some have touted a growing move by the ecosystem to tap open-source projects in support of moving away from long-used VMware services.
“I'm starting to see more customers looking at open-source alternatives, for example, to move away from that lock-in that seems to be coming across quite strong from a lot of customers at the moment,” Shane O'Rourke, senior director for global VMware support services at Spinnaker, recently told SDxCentral about some enterprises
looking to migrate away from VMwarefollowing Broadcom’s controversial licensing changes. “Whereas initially they might have been thinking alternatives … now they're actually going, ‘hold on, we need to consider other options here,’ which is interesting. It's very interesting to kind of see that change and will be interesting to see what happens there.”
Analysts have been noting the possibility of enterprises seeking open-source alternatives to VMware, with many citing hypervisor options like Hyper V, the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), Proxmox, and Oracle. OpenStack has also been offered up as one of those solutions, backed by the Open Infrastructure Foundation having touted significant migration of its member base to the open-source platform.
O’Rourke noted that these options are opening opportunities for new entrants to piece together platforms that can be more curated to the needs of those legacy VMware customers looking for alternatives.
“I don't think overall in the industry that you can say there's a hard date or whatever, it's going to kind of be continuing, and the industry changes so quickly,” O’Rourke said. “A year-and-a-half-ago, which is not a long period of time, you didn't really hear about open source, I rarely heard it. All I heard was Nutanix and Red Hat, whereas now you're starting to hear others kind of options are in the mix.”