SAN FRANCISCO – VMware is aiming to be the Switzerland of Kubernetes orchestration based on the vendor's Tanzu philosophy of "bring your own Kubernetes," VMware Tanzu SVP Edward Hieatt told SDxCentral.

VMware's newest updates to the Tanzu Kubernetes portfolio, including Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 integration with Red Hat's OpenShift Kubernetes platform, fall in line with what Hieatt described as the broader vision of VMware's Tanzu efforts.

Enterprises today are likely dealing with at least two private and one to three public clouds, driven by "fickle developers picking more and more easy-to-use things out in the wild, and ending up with a big bill from three or four cloud providers, or at least one or two," he said. And to the enterprise CIO banking on the promises of cloud migrations, a scenario like that doesn't scream progress.

"Tanzu, and VMware as well, had the attitude that someone has to come along and simplify the complexity, collapse the complexity, and make some consistency. You know, kind of get back to a disciplined approach to how we do computing despite all these new options," Hieatt said.

Kubernetes is the "guiding light" to finding some semblance of simplicity, because all clouds expose Kubernetes implementations. "It'd be hard to write software that works perfectly across all these clouds, except for Kubernetes is now a consistency across," Hieatt said.

In terms of Tanzu, it recognizes that Kubernetes is everywhere across all these clouds and building abstractions on top of that can help operators more easily run containers and lifecycle management.

"We're trying to be doing good things for the industry [by] collapsing complexity to make operators and developers more and more productive," Hieatt said. "The idea is we're the open company to bring your own Kubernetes, right, and that extends to, perhaps you might say competitors' Kubernetes, because we want to be open and capture all the — be the Switzerland."

But for its emphasis on ecosystem collaboration for simplicity's sake, VMware still plans to sustain competition with rivals in other areas. "We'll compete hard though, above that [Kubernetes] layer with [Red Hat], in this case, on Tanzu tech," he explained.

IBM, which bought Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion, is clearly a huge VMware partner on various fronts, Hieatt said, and that's "the dynamic that opened the door to some of these conversations. We're doing bigger things together than that, so let's partner up," as opposed to continuing the old VMware versus Red Hat dance.

Hieatt expects OpenShift won't be the last rival k8s platform to integrate with Tanzu. "There's no doubt that the bring your own Kubernetes, any cloud is only gonna get broader," he said.

VMware prides itself on this open ecosystem strategy and being at the forefront of pushing vendor agnostic simplicity.

In terms of a "heavyweight coming in and saying let's make sense of all of this, I do think you can say VMware is unique," Hieatt touted.

"Not to pick on Google or Amazon or Microsoft," but "their interest, fundamentally, is capturing workloads. They're in the cloud wars. They want those workloads," he said, adding the idea that hyperscalers would champion increased workload portability or allow other vendors and cloud providers to have those workloads doesn't seem logical.

But VMware has partnerships in some capacity with all the major hyperscalers, and "the reason is they know that VMware has strong enterprise relationships and credibility in enterprise that they might not always have. They know that VMware effectively controls legacy workloads," he said, referencing VMware vSphere's decades long tenure as an industry favorite.

"And they know that therefore, in general, VMware can bring them workloads. So if they don't play ball with supporting these extra platforms that VMware is building, they're gonna miss out on those workloads," Hieatt explained.

To that point, VMware is a channel for workloads, and the vendor's rivals would rather have some access to the its pipeline of workloads than none.

"Now, do they want to make their one the most compelling? Would they prefer less abstraction from their platform? Sure," he said. But at the end of the day, hyperscalers' undying mission to get more workloads takes precedence over smaller concerns, he explained.

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