Podcast: Evolving vSphere to Support the Latest Tech Trends – VMware Cloud Community

In our latest Multi-Cloud Podcast, VMware Solution Architect Justin Murray dives into the evolution of vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation, and how they support emerging technologies to meet customer demand.

If you have any level of responsibility for architecting an environment that will best support one or more applications, there is a good chance that at some point you’ll be asked to weigh in on a question like the following: “What’s the best platform for running [insert the name of a brand new app] using [insert the name of a new emerging technology that is critical to that app]?”

The guest on our most recent Multi-Cloud Podcast is Justin Murray. Justin is a VMware solution architect and a VMworld favorite. He focuses on understanding how well emerging technologies perform when deployed on vSphere. He’s one of many at VMware whose job is to make sure that VMware proves that your application will run great on the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation. Eric Nielsen (@ericnipro) and I (@davidj7494) talked with Justin about a couple of recent projects he’s been working on that exemplify what VMware does to ensure that new technologies deployed on VMware can meet the most demanding customer requirements. 

Tech innovations are continuous

In 2001, VMware released ESX 1. In less than 10 years, it had become the mostly widely used compute virtualization software in the data center. 20 years after ESX 1, and now with over 500,000 customers, VMware continues to be the most widely used virtualization software running in the data center.

While luck or fate always play a role in success, hard work and innovative thinking are usually at least 50% of the reason companies succeed. To stay on top, product teams have to continuously evolve VMware’s virtualization and cloud software to address new customer requirements. 

One source of these new requirements is the need to support emerging technologies. In the years since 2001, the world has seen many new technology trends become mainstream. Think about it: public cloud, big data, internet of things, machine learning and so on.  

Software engineers, product managers and solution architects all spend a considerable amount of time each year assessing how well these new technologies run on VMware. Then, as needed, they introduce modifications into the code base that will optimize the performance of these new technologies when running on VMware.

Evolving vSphere to support streaming platforms

In the past 18 months, Justin has been involved in two areas that are important to businesses deploying online event streaming platforms: Kafka and machine learning algorithms. These two software technologies are often core elements in online event streaming platforms.  

Industry-leading companies like Netflix, Uber andFacebook all deploy online event streaming platforms to support capturing and analyzing massive amounts of streaming data, as well as continuously optimizing the delivery of their online services. But it’s not just the tech darlings deploying this kind of platform. According to some estimates, this type of software stack is now deployed at some 60% plus of all enterprises.  

Listen to the podcast

Eric and I had a great time talking with Justin about his solution architect role and the work he does with emerging technologies and vSphere. It was great to hear from Justin how VMware continues to invest heavily in ensuring we deliver the best platform for running any kind of app, on any kind of cloud. 

You can also watch our latest episode on YouTube or catch it on Spotify. If you missed any of our other Multi-Cloud Podcast episodes, you can find them all on the following SoundCloud playlist.