Wow. Another whirlwind VMworld US is over. As you expect, we made a massive amount of TechTalks, nearly 70 presentations for over 17 hours of finished video! The full playlist is here on YouTube. Thank you to all of the presenters who shared their knowledge and experience with the community. Thanks also to my crew who wrangled those presenters, their presentations, and the video: Jeffrey Powers, Gregg Robertson, and the Pod Father – Cody Bunch. Having VMworld back in San Francisco is quite a change. The hotel rooms this year were smaller than the bathroom of the rooms we had at Mandalay Bay last year but cost about the same amount.
Plenty of announcements from VMware. A lot of the news was about how VMware is embracing cloud-native applications on top of vSphere. I think that there is a sea change at VMware, a realization that cloud-native development will dominate the next few years of IT innovation. What I see so far is a lot of infrastructure improvement, rather than developer enablement. A Kubernetes cluster is just infrastructure that is required before a containerized application can run. No developer wants to deploy or manage infrastructure; VMware’s Project Pacific will make IT operations easier by deploying Kubernetes as easily as we now deploy VMs. I hope that the Pivotal acquisition helps VMware to learn what developers need, tools that simplify application development and reduce the amount of code required to build new features. The next couple of years will show whether VMware can add a real developer focus to the current infrastructure focus.
I am looking forward to VMworld EMEA; I always enjoy Barcelona. We may see some management and EUC announcements from VMware. We will definitely have a full schedule of TechTalks. If you are at VMworld EMEA, drop by the TechTalks stage, and say hi.