What? VMware is virtualizing Clouds now???

VMware's latest announcement about Cross-Cloud Architecture goes beyond moving a virtual machine between "Clouds", it's a tried and true approach to a new domain. In the 2000's, VMW changed the industry by applying a thin layer of software to a physical server allowing us to carve that server up into many virtual (machines) servers. Then they released vMotion... OMG, now I can move these virtual machines between these physical servers without incurring downtime, changing network or storage configurations. 

Pretty hot stuff, and it revolutionized data center operations for over a decade. In comes the Cloud era, and VMware is taking the same approach to Clouds. Customers are concerned with keeping all of their eggs in one basket due to risk management regulations, which brings forth the requirement for workload portability. This gets to be sticky because pick your favorite Cloud and you're pretty much standardizing on their construct for a virtual machine. In AWS we have EC2 instances (not to mention containers and such), in MS Azure we have virtual machines and so on and never shall they mix. Now, I'm not gonna get into the Open Virtualization Format here but imagine the type of Cloud Service Provider (CSP) lock-in, that can create. Customers want flexibility, they want to be able to choose their CSP's with the same flexibility that they chose hardware in the data center. VMware virtualized server infrastructure (back then) to create that flexibility and portability and customers are looking for the same solution in the Cloud era. 

With Cross-Cloud Architecture, VMW presents layers of virtualization allowing customers to pick their favorite Cloud, maintaining the same virtual machine constructs they know and love and allowing portability between CSP's. VMware's advancements in network and security virtualization makes all of this a reality allowing customers to extend the same policy-based management across different Cloud Service Providers. 

So this brings me back to the same thought... VMware is virtualizing Clouds now!! Thank you and keep innovating, VMware.