VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is VMware’s fully software-defined data center, built upon a reference architecture that is industrialized and used at-scale by customers around the world, and wrapped with simplified and automated operations for deployment, scaling, and life-cycling.
Broadcom’s objective with VCF is to enable customers to be their own cloud provider. We want to help our customers to build and operate a private cloud on top of VCF, and to do so cost-effectively on-premises in their data center, or within a service provider or hyperscaler environment.
We don’t use terms like “private cloud” to capitalize on buzzwords. Describing something as a “Cloud” really implies a lot about how customers can consume the services available to build and power their applications. In the context of a private cloud, “cloud” also implies things about how the infrastructure team operates and manages performance, capacity, and cost to facilitate consumption and to provide a contestable alternative to public cloud offerings.
Cloud computing is not about where you do computing, it’s about how you do computing. So, providing a private cloud to your business is about more than just having a virtualization platform to run VMs and containers. Private Cloud depends upon frictionless, cloud-like consumption of infrastructure and services (databases, load balancers, object storage, and so on), to simplify the way your customers design and build their applications. Underpinning a Private Cloud is the effective and proactive management of performance, capacity, and cost of the infrastructure and workloads, backed up by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that explicitly define what level of service you are providing your customers.
Included within VCF is Aria Operations; an operations tool which forms the cloud management and operations layer of the software-defined data center. Aria Operations provides customers with the tools they need to effectively operate their software-defined data center as a private cloud. However, the implementation of SLAs to cover availability and performance is not yet an out-of-the-box experience, and there is more work for us at Broadcom to do to simplify this for you.
This whitepaper aims to complete the story by articulating the value of implementing service-oriented operating principles for your private cloud using SLAs. It outlines the supporting components that are required for, or support, the proactive management of your private cloud in accordance with the SLAs you define.
For those of you who have thought about - or perhaps tried to implement – SRE-type concepts within the IT part of your business, the principles we’re discussing in this whitepaper are foundational for that. There is little point providing SLAs and SLOs for your applications if they are running on infrastructure that provide no guarantees at all: it’s just hoping for the best.
This whitepaper does not attempt to provide all the technical detail required to implement these principles within Aria Operations. This can be technically complex, and there is not a generic one-size-fits-all approach. We hope that the content in this whitepaper will get your operational-focused technical specialists excited about the benefits of implementing these principles and start them thinking about what such an implementation might look like for your specific business. For assistance with moving from concept to implementation, VMware Professional Services can be engaged to assist your operational teams.
The intended audience for this whitepaper is IT decision-makers who want a conceptual understanding of what service-oriented operations should look like for a private cloud on VCF, and the importance of implementing service-oriented operating principles based on proactive and effective management of performance, capacity, and cost, and wrapped with SLAs which explicitly define the service you are providing.