CFD6 VMware API Questions

CFD6 VMware API Questions

While, attending Cloud Field Day 6 in Silicon Valley as a delegate for Tech Field Day, Dell and VMware gave us their pitch on VMware Cloud Foundation.

To be clear, I had zero understanding of VCF prior to this. When I attend these events I want to ask legitimately DUMB questions as I would as a customer hearing about a product for the first time. Now to be fair, I absolutely love some things that VMware does, but as most other companies out there, there are some things that do not make sense. One of the things that I find extremely annoying from VMware is their API functionality in most cases. And generally the annoying part for me is the documentation around API usage.

IT IS GETTING BETTER

With this all being said, I’d like to walk through what was in my head while hearing these presentations. In the previous session to the one below, we heard all about VXRail, etc. Very cool stuff for sure. However, as the session for VCF was progressing, my head went to a place of absolute disorganization based on what I was hearing. Typical for me in most cases because to be fair, I do not generally look at solutions in the same manner that a normal consumer would. So, as I was listening to the VCF presentation, I thought that they had done something really cool here and brought a layer of abstraction up in the stack that a consumer could tap into from an automation perspective. Meaning that one could simply automate a FULL VMware stack from a single API endpoint and not have to worry about all of the additional layers (APIs) of everything else in the lower levels (vCenter, vRA, vRO, NSX, etc.). So I started with my questions to hopefully get an answer on what the real story was. Did I ask the questions as clear as I could have? Probably not. But as usual (IMO), the lack of a clear strategy from VMware across all products was rampant in my brain. In one instance the reference of if you are only concerned about vCenter, then this probably is not for you (my interpretation). In reality, I want to be concerned about the whole stack. Full stack automation is definitely in my favor here, but I digress. Now did I misinterpret the story being told? Possibly and I hope that is the case. But my real point is this, every vendor needs to absolutely convey a clear story on their strategy so that every level of consumer understands. But to be fair, VMware is a huge company and covers a massive amount of ground. So, this is somewhat expected but I personally think they should do a better job on telling their complete story without all of the added layers of complexity. If I want to do this, go over here, if I want to do that, go over there, etc., etc.

Conclusion

As I mentioned above. I truly hope that I completely misinterpreted the story being told. If I did, I would absolutely love some additional dialog for clarity on my part.

In the video segment below, Ned Bellevance tees up my questions very well. And no, we did not plan this!

In addition to all of this, Keith Townsend just published a very good article around the VMware’s Cloud in 300-words that you should definitely check out as well.

As always, enjoy!