This one is short and sweet! The vCloud Hybrid Service is no more, and is now VMware vCloud Air!
Furthermore – it keeps getting bigger (more locations), and better (more capabilities – DR as a Service, Backup as a Service, and Platform as a Service) – with one of the new additions being one of the industries’ richest web-scale, geo-dispersed and efficient - which can translate into the lowest cost model – object (and HDFS!) store!
No cloud service is really complete without PaaS and Object stores – and it’s great that the vCloud Air service is getting them… What is delivering the underlying Object/HDFS Storage? Answer – EMC ViPR.
Yup – the VMware vCloud Air Object Storage service runs on EMC ViPR Object!
For the doubters for the concept of the Federation, sure you can see examples where the Federation parties are “Open” (which we are – see how VMware and EMC are embracing Openstack a little differently, or Pivotal running on AWS, or EMC’s HDFS offerings partnering with Cloudera). And here’s an example of the Federation being “Partnered tightly” (which we ALSO are!). Beyond this example of “partnered tightly” include how Pivotal Cloud Foundry (BOSH CPI layer) integrates with the vRealize management tools and with vCloud Air (and ultimately with the EMC ViPR HDFS implementation) and many, many more.
The vCloud Air Object Storage service has these core characteristics:
- Access: RESTful API based access w GUI based management
- Durability and Availability • 99.95% availability w 11 9’s of of durability
- Bucket Versioning
- Authentication via Token-based and/or Username and password based, and Public URLs
- Scalability: PB->EB scale, Object size limit – 20TB and 1000 Buckets, Unlimited Object
If you’re interested in participating in the Beta (will run from Sept to Oct), here’s what you need to know:
- Not all who apply will necessarily get into the beta – it’s available only to a select few customers
- Beta participants will become a partner and have a voice in the development of the service, and have availability to Object Storage promotions that are only available to Beta customers
- … Plus – it’s always good to establish relationship with Product Management and Engineering
- Applicants should have familiarity with the concept of Object Storage Active, and really an project in the works that is setup to leverage Object Storage in the next 6-12 months – so really start to put it to the test…
- Applicants should be able to commit time and resources to test the product and provide active feedback and be willing to participate in de-brief sessions (Not more than one or two 30 minute meetings a month)
If you’re interested – applying is easy! The link is here: http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?E0C4A8B1E6A4B1BAE7
And – for those of curious how quickly you can develop an app, and how one uses an Object store (which is pretty straightforward – since the ViPR Object Store supports the S3 APIs, but also a super-set if you want) – my good friends Jonas Rosland and Matt Cowger whipped up a little Pivotal Cloud Foundry app that uses the vCloud Air Object store service. This demo shows a couple things: 1) how simple the apps can be and how simple bolting on S3-compatible object access can be; 2) how Pivotal uses containers (droplets – using Warden now, Docker is targeted for Diego – the next DEA re-architecture) to create a fully self-contained run environment for the app; 3) how you can use the wide ecosystem of tools to access S3-compatible objects with the vCloud Air Object store. Thanks guys, and to all – enjoy!
What do you think? Are you interested in the Beta?
All the code for the ViPR + PaaS demo is on my GitHub:
https://github.com/mcowger/vipr-twitter
Posted by: Mcowger | August 28, 2014 at 01:55 AM