Mark Baker
on 2 September 2013
On Monday August 26th, VMware announced the general availability of their vCloud Hybrid Service. This service, initially opened back in May to a restricted set of early adopters provides VMware customers with a means of being able to easily bring their workloads out of their own datacentres and into to the cloud.
For many customers this is exactly what they want – they may have been wanting to move some of their workloads off premise but found the prospect of switching to a full blown public cloud provider a scary prospect. vCHS offers them a great way to move workloads to the cloud without having to worry about migrating to new technologies, api compatibility or sourcing a new vendor. At Canonical we have a vision of complete workload portability across any public or private cloud. Sure, it is a requirement that the workloads run on Ubuntu but Ubuntu’s ubiquity in cloud is close to making this a reality and with our growth in usage for scale out workloads such as delivery of online infrastructure far outstripping that of other Linux platforms, it seems that end users don’t have a problem with it. It certainly seems that with our engagements around OpenStack, Nicira and vCHS, VMware believe in the ubiquity of Ubuntu in cloud. Combined with VMware’s ubiquity in the enterprise, between the 2 of us we are going to do some great things.