Feature Friday Episode 63 - Green Cloud Defense uses VMware Tanzu

hi and welcome to feature fridays and my name is guy bartram i'm the director of product marketing at vmware in our cloud services business unit and today i'm delighted by to be joined by uh justin fox from green cloud defence so justin please uh give everyone an introduction yourself hey everyone uh again my name is justin fox uh senior director of product and software development here at green cloud defense uh and certainly happy to uh to be here for this feature friday excellent well thanks thanks for joining us justin and thank you for what you're going to run us through today which is all about green cloud defense um and specifically some of the innovation you guys have been doing with with tanzu and portals for your customers but let's um let's just reel back a second let's just start with what is uh green cloud defense um how long have you been in business uh what sort of services do you provide and just talk through the name change because there was a name change recently yeah sure um so green cloud we've been around 10 years this is actually uh i think in july we just had our official 10-year anniversary we're gonna have a celebration here um congrats this month actually uh an employee celebration um so uh yeah big milestone there for sure we started and have been a vmware cloud provider for that for the last 10 years um that's kind of our core business offering um an is infrastructure service on top of with the cloud director platform right so okay going back to uh the early days of that of that platform for sure uh and we've we've come up to the to the modern and been on that journey with with vmware uh we we've evolved some of our product sets uh over those years adding in uh backup and dr um some with third parties some with vmware solutions um and we also added in the horizon das platform so we we can offer dads as well uh we do uh shared multi-tenant right based on cloud director like i had mentioned but we also offer a dedicated private cloud so we can stand up dedicated infrastructure that's running vmware vsphere um you know for specific individual tenants that maybe they have certain unique requirements that maybe the multi-tenant won't uh won't work for so we kind of uh are your you know your your one-stop shop for all your cloud services if that's what you need um and just recently we made an acquisition earlier this year so kind of talking about the name change that you had mentioned previously we started this green cloud technologies and then earlier this year we made an acquisition of a managed security service provider um out of the west coast um uh they were they were named cascade defense uh so we rebranded to green cloud defense so we still uh keep the brand that we've built for 10 years of green cloud i'm still continuing to develop iterate and sell those cloud services and we've added a whole suite of security services so that's where we dropped technologies and changed it for defense so that that was a big uh a big thing for us this year we've been um you know looking at getting more into offering uh full kind of turnkey security services um for a little while and building all that out uh is certainly um a challenge and so something like uh an acquisition can help uh uh you know kind of move your head a little further so we yeah we acquired a great partner um you know a great company i should say and uh you know which brought us uh a wealth of security experience and um you know a sock uh and and all that so um it was a it was a really good fit um and uh you know with with our with our vision and what we wanted to do going into security so just things aligned and we were able to do it and get it completed and so we're we're off to the races in 2021 um and it's and it's been kind of great uh you know we i'd say we have a unique position in the cloud world we are a channel focused cloud provider so a little different than some of the other ones out there in the market we we don't go direct to a customer right we want to work through uh managed service provider community um vars uh in the aging community that's kind of where we wanna we wanna work through uh versus kind of going direct um you know simply because it allows those uh that channel to to choose how they want to approach it just kind of pass through if they want to kind of you know brand their own cloud or their own security services but use us in the back end they can do that so it offers a lot of flexibility and and then we're not competing with them we're you know they you know msps um you know they they're they're the ones with the relationships with the small business and the customers and and and those relationships are priceless uh quite frankly in the small business world and so that's why when we when we started 10 years ago we you know we decided to build this channel only um and and just have continued that through the years uh and and you know i'd say we've been successful we've made it 10 years right so yeah yeah you know it's it's it's been a fun journey um and we're excited about where we're going in the future yeah so okay so you've seen um quite a historic amount of change then in vmware cloud director i mean he must have been one of the 1.0 adopters in that in that case for 10 years because bcd was 10 years old last year so that's that's quite something congratulations on that and thank you thank you for staying with us yeah yeah it's it's been a fun journey for sure so yeah i'm sure i'm sure ups and downs i imagine absolutely absolutely yeah so um from a point of view of um let's just just rewind two seconds so you said uh you made an acquisition uh and did that acquisition come with a vmware customer base as well no the security acquisition did not we've made a couple other acquisitions over the years that did come with vmware customer base um you know those were more cloud focused acquisitions previously where where we were you know either expanding a book of business or we were expanding a data center footprint maybe we didn't have a presence in a particular region um and and you know we would acquire someone in that region that would give us an immediate presence and we wouldn't have to stand up an entire data center you know we're not a facilities company um so we we take down space in in the larger facilities um you know simply because it's uh you know building facility is quite expensive um and so we we didn't we didn't think that when we started years ago that there was that that was really the right way to go and we've just continued that taking down space in the kind of the larger data center providers cool cool so your customers then are um uh other partners basically msps like you say and you are in the business of delivering your platform and platform services to them to be able to deliver their services onto their customers they own the end customer relationship yeah absolutely and you weave in the mssp services as well in there as a value-added extra or is that a you know a part of the platform um portfolio that's kind of rolled in automatically we weave it in there um as as optional we've kind of found over the years um you know giving uh partners and msps options um to to kind of versus bundling stuff and yeah almost in requiring it in a way you know so that they don't feel like they have to buy something or pay for something that maybe they're not going to use so so we offer them uh that can be weaved in they can also be purchased independently you know you don't have to purchase our cloud services to purchase our security services um and of course security extends beyond the cloud exp it extends the premise it extends to the remote uh workforce um and and the like so uh you know in additionally partners uh msps you know they've obviously got uh stacks of their own that they've built kind of over the years yes their security approach has evolved from traditional endpoint protection and and things of that nature to to more modern approaches with you know edr and such um so so we we didn't want to make make it them feel like well they have to replace what they've built operational process around so we've got a a a variety of offerings that can you know you know build upon what they've built and that way they don't have to change their process so that that was kind of a big thing and we try and take that same approach with the cloud as well um you know but don't don't change things that if you've built uh methodologies and how you work and that's actually the beauty of cloud director right especially as it's evolved you know in the earlier days it was quite a different ui than vsphere yeah um but but they've kind of uh where we're at now for sure today um in the 10x build um you know vsphere and cloud director are are very very uh similar interfaces so it's not um a big shock for a vsphere admin to to suddenly get into cloud director yeah so it's it's it's been quite kind of nice for us to have some of those things uh but we really want to augment that msp we want to we want to be their cloud department their security department um you know we would prefer obviously that they don't go stand up their own uh take down space in a data center and try and invest all that capital to go stand up uh you know a cloud infrastructure let we've already done that we've got we know how to do it and it's the same thing with security don't try and go build out a sock um you know let let us let us take care of that we've got the experts uh in-house and and you know we're going to continue to grow that as well so yeah it's it's a definitely a model i'm seeing more of now um around the world there's various providers out there who are doing exactly that same model um you know instead of a partner having to go to a hyper scale provider and deliver on a totally different platform you know what they're used to is vmware they can now come to a company like yours and deliver the same vmware services they've always been delivering now on your hardware and then complement it with your services and like you say it's really interesting because i think about five years ago everyone was bundling services together that was kind of the the big kind of trend i guess it got a little bit inherited from telco but that was the way it was done um you know the more you bundle the more discount you get etcetera etcetera and now we've sort of gone whole reverse out of that into uh actually you know it's it's a it's a uh a catalog of services just click what you want and off you go yeah yeah you're absolutely right we we had some bundles a few years ago too that we've kind of uh since broken apart um yeah you know it's i think it's just the evolution of um you know the markets offering more diverse offerings and so you kind of you have to adapt to that to say well if the market has a wider selection now you know maybe we do need to find those pieces that can complement what other market pieces may do um so in this the same way in security you know we have one of our one of our security offerings is um a sem based offering and that's one of those that just kind of fits right in you know a lot of msps out there probably already have an edr platform an endpoint protection they've already got you know email security and some other uh security stack and so firewalls maybe whatever it is they're using uh but but they're missing that that centralized um aggregation and sock right and so that's kind of one of those one of those things that we we decided to to go to market with as well cool okay so let's um talk about the the stack you've got then and and what we're here today to talk about which is more around this tans we've played how did you um first of all how where did you start with tanzu what what kind of made you think about this transition and how it would fit into your existing portfolio so we've been keeping an eye on containers for a little while um you know it's been around for a number of years now um and trying to figure out from a product focus how can we educate that msp community on how this can benefit them um and that's that's a pretty challenging thing in small business right small business you know enterprise a little different small business which is really what the msp focus is on small to small to medium business and so um you know we saw a lot of challenges feedback we were getting from our partner based in the communities we're in you know everyone thought it was neat and interesting but finding use cases to to adopt it was challenging so you know we we were looking at it from that perspective first but then we have um you know agreeing our partner portal that we call it where um our partners interact with us they they can come in they can transact build build service orders et cetera and they can have some visibility into some of their services today right we have some integration points into cloud director and you know cloud directory availability and and some of our other products but we wanted we decided a few years back now that we wanted to expand that that partner portal capability so what was the what's the best way to do that and we started looking at how the current infrastructure platform is built uh and and it would be built as a traditional monolith right it's a it's a number of years old now from the standpoint of it it's it's genesis was was a number of years ago um so you know we're like how do we further improve our way to iterate we've we've added a whole bunch of security products we've we've added additional cloud services products and and we need to to uh at a more rapid rate be able to ingest feature functionality into our partner right we we want that to um you know be the entry point into our services and interactions with green cloud beyond really just transacting and and and maybe you know subscribing to an email report we we want to be able to say hey look come in here and this is where you interact with us for you know call it 80 of what you need to do with us so that was kind of the question or the goal how do we do that and how do we make the platform more nimble to be able to in you know create new integrations at a much faster pace uh but additionally at the same time be able to iterate in an integration without having to um you know do an entire uh release of the entire platform which right monolith that's that's how it's gonna work right yeah so so you so you had a slightly different use case then so at the same time as kind of looking at this as potentially a customer offer for your portfolio you have uh what every service provider has a lot of operational support systems and business support systems um and probably like most service providers if not every service provider you know over the last five ten years grown an interface which has got more and more complex more and more slow and uh you know grind and you know i guess it goes goes back to that sort of that bundling conversation is about providing that granularity of service uh being able to iterate new services far more proactively far more agile in terms of your delivery without infecting your production instance um and particularly for you guys when you got multiple partners so who uses the interface the portal today is it your partners use it to set up the customers and customer services or is it the interface for their customers to use to get into the green cloud infrastructure so we've actually got three primary audiences we've got the partner um and and you know that for them to interact the partner can choose they'll have control to to enable maybe if their customer has internal i.t uh access into our portal to be able to interact with just their their customer or that end customer services um and then we have uh greencloud internal you know we use it as well right i mean it's it's it's it's our portal that kind of runs our that kind of i mean it does it runs our business right it's where the transaction information is happening and and so you know when we're taking support calls the support team needs to get in look up the accounts see what services they have uh understand what region or data center they may be in to go make sure they can properly uh you know support the customer or the partner so so those are the three primary audiences that we have so try to take all of those into account um to your point we have a lot of operational systems underneath to help operate it we have a lot of um different data center and locations where the those operational platforms are so you know kind of we start you know we're changing a little bit uh our viewpoint of our partner portal in that you know we we want to drive even greater adoption than we already have and we're going to do that by focusing on really from a product perspective almost pivoting from just a utility that you get as as being a green cloud partner to a a product to a value um uh proposition of green cloud is is you know this that that uh what everybody wants that single pane of glass right so try and build it as close as possible and and quite frankly the the putting in a um nimble platform underneath like a tan zoo really really is going to enable us to do that right to the points we talked about just a few minutes ago where um you know rapid adoption rapid deployment um and then rapid modification of stuff that's already deployed which is which is going to be i think very very very important for us as we go forward yeah and as um you know being in product management um you understand that obviously it's important to understand customer usage of the service and which services are being used in what ways um and you get to now build in those kpis and metrics into the platform so it's far easier for you to see what's working and what isn't working uh for you to make you know future product choices on that's right absolutely you know so so as far as the journey we we took that goal right and and and we we started looking around and and determined that that micro services was was the way to go building upon a containerized platform and and so you know this this happened a couple years ago um uh i would say as the journey started um and then it was okay well what platform do you use you know because there are a lot out there um you know and so you know we were tasked our kind of our chief architect and a couple of devs to go you know do some homework and and and let's try and find what we think would be uh kind of the platform to to start with uh so you know we we looked around obviously the open source community is great there's a ton out there but one of the the big keys for us um is is supportability um and the ability to to get support if we need something and and so we started looking at more paid solutions um that maybe we could use some open source pieces but let's start looking at some more more enterprise paid type solutions and we just kept coming back to tanzu because we're such a big vmware partner already so we've been with vmware 10 years you know obviously you guys started a few years back you know getting getting this journey going with kubernetes and so you know we we looked into it we ran some of the you know we used the hands-on labs to just kind of you know kick the kick the tires go in a little bit get some hands on experience see what we thought um you know and and then started looking trying we started putting together a journey map of of how we're going to get from a to b uh because you know we can't just get to you know you don't just jump right to end stage we have to iterate and so the first thing was um you know let's just let's get it going get the infrastructure going um follow the reference designs from vmware who you guys had those for us and then start building that infrastructure so we spent a fair amount of time i should say about yeah maybe maybe close to a year implementing the infrastructure implementing um and updating our ci cd pipeline processes integrating with git so that we can have release cycles can source control all that stuff had to be ironed out documented um so that when we wanted to start going to production we had uh kind of some guidelines on how we can go about it and of course as you know that's always going to be improved upon but yeah that was we we spent a little bit of time getting that in place first that foundation uh for us to then uh start adopting and start writing um some micro services to interact with the portal and we've got a handful written today um probably the the most prominent one we've written for ourselves is our integration with cloud director availability um where where that was a a product we actually released this year as well in 2021 and we previously uh did not have a a dr offering with cloud director availability um but uh you know we've been keeping an eye on that product once once version we took part in the beta for version four and we're really pleased with where it had come from a maturity standpoint so we decided we wanted to get uh get that product released and and so we released that as a service uh and and of course we built upon that with our our micro service integration to our portal um so it's actually um you know quite a a nice integration there's you know what you what i've got some some examples i can show you here absolutely absolutely kind of how that interface looks like in our partner portal um you know but of course underneath um you know it's all running on on the tanzania kubernetes grid platform um and and which is is really really really neat i mean we've already got some uh you know backlog improvements to tweak some of this um and and the fact that we can just release just that micro service um it cuts the release down down exponentially uh right versus versus the the the monolith side um so it's uh we're pretty excited about it um and we've got a number of other ones in flight too um we've got some integrations with vrops um you know another vmware product so uh those are all active today uh but but the d-raz with vmr one is is the is the biggest so this is um so just be clear then you've got your your vcd stack you've got your vca stack your availability stack um you've got a whole load of other stuff like monitoring you said um and then you have a separate tanzu hypnose grid instance which is then running the the portal um and also calling all of the back end integrations and to your cmdb and your other oss and bss that you have um orchestrating the whole whole thing and is this being used for like complete life cycle from you know standing up a new partner delivering the service for the partner activating the service provider configuring it uh to deleting and removing the service when a pilot chooses they don't wish to have the service anymore so it's it's the it's used to stand them up and enable the service um we don't um use it to do set up protections um simply because sometimes they go to the product for that because we don't you know that that's something that they kind of need to determine what they want to protect different profiles they want to pick for the slas inside of cloud director availability um additionally sometimes the the workloads aren't you know in our infrastructure yet um to you know we have to first migrate workloads in and and so uh so for now it's it's building the cloud director pieces the vdc the org uh and then enabling um you know the appropriate uh bcda uh pieces um and then on termination uh we we disable um that's just kind of uh you know uh the system will disable but it won't delete um we have some cleanup that the team will will go do we have a policy where we we delete um after a period of time but uh you know it is possible that they could they could call in for a huge favor if they need it um and and you know we're in the business of helping um but you know uh you know we we help where we can um the partner that that's kind of one of our um our value ads you know because we're partner focused you know if the partner is not successful at getting their customer to adopt cloud or security services then we're not successful right so it's a little different mindset than than kind of going direct to to an end customer so and and some integration in the back end is that using terraform or is that using the the kind of vcd apis and vca apis are you actually using the terraform provider with vcd uh apis so we're doing all api yeah all right should we have a second yeah that was gonna say there'll be there'll be some stuff uh that we'll look at uh doing some terraform with in the future um because terraform's got such a list of supportable um integrations so we'll look at some but if but but at times too um it can be another layer right um that maybe you don't need if you if the apis are there for you um and we've already got um you know know how to code to them yeah some of that's going to depend on on documentation right the the api documentation for cloud director and and cloud director availability is uh solid so you know we didn't have any issues coding to it yeah good we'd love to hear [Laughter] all right so let's have a look then so you're going to show us now the uh cloud director availability portal for partners to go in and and be able to provision is that right okay yeah i'm gonna show uh a previously you know so the orders provisioned uh at this point and i'm gonna show so we we focused on the provisioning piece and then the visibility piece is kind of what we focused on which is um the partner wants to see the status hey how do i see the status of my protections sure um you know how many i'm protecting how much storage i'm consuming uh and things of that nature so that's that's what i'm gonna show in some of the interactive ways that we built it um so that the partner gets a good experience and just before we go into that just obviously here there's obviously there's three layers there's you the partner the customer and the partner is interested in the customer consumption um and generating customer bill obviously you're interested in the partner consumption and generating a partner bill how are you collecting that in the portal are you doing anything any integrations with billing in the portal and and able to show uh utilization from a billing perspective a metering perspective so that's actually one of our differentiators um we we don't follow a metering model we're out we're allocation we we uh some early on in the days when we were doing partner research you know was um you know and that was i think a challenge of hyperscale adoption was the metering model 95th percentile things like that and and this bill that kind of does this um and the small business doesn't like that so we we came to market and and have have done this for a number of years now of just you know you pay for what you want and and that you know it's kind of a you can use up to that or or or less than but your bill stays fixed so that's kind of that's kind of that model that that we went with so they'll will be able to see usage contract versus consumed and that allows them to make calculated decisions to adjust the service with us so that gives them time to go have a conversation with the customer to say hey we need to increase your bill or uh hope you know sometimes good news hey look we see that utilization is actually a little lower than what we originally thought we can actually reduce that that service a little bit which is always a good thing right to do in small business you know you get a nice win uh to both the partner and the customer so so you're using a an actual reservation model then in vcd and saying right we're reserving this amount for you correct you you can use up to it but there isn't anything else and that kind of work i guess from a service level that really works as well because you want to ensure the partner service level is 100 in terms of resource utilization um and with the reservation model okay they're paying for stuff that potentially they don't need or aren't using but you're guaranteeing that service level which they can then pass down to their customer correct that's absolutely correct yep okay cool yeah well great let me get my screen shared here can you see my browser it's just loaded yep got it great so so this is our our partner portal um you know this is kind of the ui that they would see um you can see there's some different menus across the top that they'll have access to uh it does have some role-based access control you can assign partnerships different levels or users different levels of access which will change the top menus you can see i'm under the account green cloud demo i am in as a as an admin user of that of that green cloud demo account so i can see all the menus if i need to and you can see what it's green we're on the services menu um and we're under the d-rads with vmware service um here and you can see we've got um you know my account and then of course just some details about it here so we're what we're doing is we're we're making the api call here to the to the container which is then doing an api call into the cloud directory availability uh endpoint yeah yeah so you can say your parent account would be your partner account and the account would be their customer account potentially would that be right yeah that's correct yep so partners green cloud defense which is which is us and and then of course the the customer screencloud demo um you can see we've got a subscription so a lot of our stuff works on subscriptions that's where you build your services so you know all the different piece parts you'll need to make the service complete if it's drafts you know uh licensing how many how many workloads do we need to protect um you know how much compute do you need to reserve in in the dr side how much storage do you need um you know a firewall nsx edge or something bandwidth those types of how many public ips so that essentially the dr environment has a set of resources ready in the event that you need to declare disaster you don't there's no having to stand up resources or any of that nature the virtual data center in cloud director is built and ready um which of course it has to be for vcda um so that it has the resources that in the event when the partner wants to declare a disaster they can execute a failover or they can call us and we'll execute it on their behalf so they we give them flexibility uh to do either of those justin does the um partner customer come through on dedicated links or do they come through over public internet for the service uh over over public internet for the service all right okay so you're going to be doing some some routing updates at the back end just to make sure it all fails over correctly and they can still reach their failed over yeah okay yep yeah there's a bunch of other stuff as well i guess to consider here which we often don't talk about which is things like the licensing that you mentioned and public iep and the transition from your kind of your active primary site to your your secondary uh recovery site and the migration of um i mean the public ip is just a matter of of obviously um flashing the root caches and updating updating the routing tables but the um licensing how do you guys handle the the licensing for someone like you know microsoft licensing for example so we're we're uh we're a spla csp from microsoft so uh we're we're a csp uh direct um so with our um i as in infrastructure we we provide a a windows server license as part of the compute bundles if you need additional microsoft licensing that we can offer on the spla program sql rds um every now and again someone does ask for exchange um but um but those we can we can obviously plus uh supply on a on a spla basis we are also a qmth partner with microsoft qualified multi-tenant hosting provider um so that enables partners who meet those requirements with their open license and software assurance to apply for licensed mobility um to to bring their own licensing for things like sql or rds should they should that will be what they want to do and then of course as part of the qmth if they have the appropriate subscription from um 365. yeah uh the appropriate subscription levels they can get shared computer activation for things like office and and windows 10 enterprise into our das product and things like that they can they can add those licenses on a subscription basis and and can and utilize those in our in our infrastructure um so so yeah so that's kind of how we approach approach that and just just for my education spla licensing does that cover you for because it's licensed per physical host right does that cover you or core i can't remember does it cover you in the secondary site with the same license it is uh it is per core that is how microsoft on the on starting with server 2016 they switched to the per core model so we like you know we license our our cluster underneath yeah um to to cover all that and um so we we include weather if you're going from green cloud to green cloud um you know one region to another um if you're certainly covered um if you're coming from prem to to green cloud um there's some conversations around like oem and things of that nature we we do include again in those you know we sell compute bundles so cpu ram and things of that nature and so we we include uh and tally windows licensing um there to cover uh to cover that uh for the partner um the but there are some use cases around oem uh licensing that the partner needs to be aware of uh you know so typically our recommendation to our partners is avoid oem licensing uh where you can for your server infrastructure because it's got a lot of limitations it's cheaper i get it um than open but with with the cloud world we're in today uh you're you're much better off going open and quite frankly investing in that software assurance i know it's more expensive which is which is a little bit of a hard sell but the flexibility that it offers to the partner uh to to move even if it's a couple years in to move to the cloud and continue to get the benefit of that investment is is is good uh in my opinion it's worth it otherwise i mean you don't want to end up paying double do you eventually for him to buy different licenses again yeah we had that issue for a number of years before microsoft um uh you know they they i think they heard their partner feedback with office right office did not have mobility um so if you if you had office 365 or you had a an open license of office you couldn't use those in a shared cloud environment like green cloud or a hyperscaler and so they heard the feedback and they kind of tweaked their their program especially with the subscription uh with 365 enabling partners to then not have to double pay which uh which obviously was very welcome from the microsoft partner community and from us as csps it was very welcome from us as well so sure for sure okay so we're looking at here the state of replicating vms for your customer through the the portal yep and you can see we've i've got seven here um and and one's in in yellow uh so so clearly i've got uh uh one that's in a warning state uh underneath and we're consuming the replications are consuming about 200 out of the 500 gigs that are contracted on this subscription right so right we can see that we're still well under usage which is great uh gives us the ability to uh we we decided not to build the product for cloud director availability around charging for different sla profiles we're just we're just all about the storage and saying look just make sure you have enough storage and then you can tailor your workloads as however you see fit instead of them having to pick and choose from a budgetary standpoint on well we can't do platinum or gold or whatever for all of them you know we're more like if you have the storage you can do gold or platinum for all of them uh excuse me that's really kind of what what we wanted to build simple simple on the sale side simple for to understand just make sure you have enough resources and then and then you know protect the workloads how you want okay and and so under details we've just got some expanding menus here again this is making an api call to the to the container which is then reaching into vcda's api and you can see now it's going to give us a list of the vms to the apps they're in their configuration which is always nice uh their storage that's allocated and then the consume storage that we're seeing uh you know from from the replications which is which is pretty neat so we see we've got a variety of different um you know workloads here in our environment that are that are being protected and from there if i want to maybe drill down a little bit more i can click any particular one and it will expand and kind of show me the the checkpoints that we have um and so on on kind of the vertical axis we have total amount of store you know data transferred for that instance and then um we have the time right of that and so you can see we're obviously not we're transferring a whole lot of data here you know these are demo servers so not a lot of change rate uh but you can see that that that does that and if if this maybe isn't as consumable you know you've got the status the plat the profile they're using what the rpo of that profile is the retention distance our latest instance right which is from today you can transfer this to a list which makes it a little bit more human readable at times but get given the partner you know the options and they get to see all of the the different ones and when you when you change and of course it collapses the other one and then opens it up so this is obvious this is all html coding here but this is pulling uh and grabbing um this data set from vcda through that container that's running on on tanzu underneath um and and it's it's uh it's quite nice because now the ui here of the portal is just making an api call to a container right it's not having to reach out to the vcda endpoint it lets the container handle that uh because we have six data centers across the united states and so um you know based on up here you'll see the subscription says houston so that's actually our south central data center location and so vcda knows and it can take this subscription which is associated with the houston facility and that will then allow it to just make that appropriate call underneath i see yeah it's quite nice yeah yeah that's quite smart yeah i recognize this mimics sorry and this this ui mimics a little bit of what you would see inside of the vcu plugin for cloud directory yeah so you know we kind of wanted to keep that same experience again 80 is kind of the target for us uh knowing uh you know so we'll always have that plug-in enabled partners we'll we'll always be able to get into cloud director um but we want them to uh for just quick access this to be that um call that single bookmark they need to make come into the green cloud portal and then from there you can get wherever you need to go ideally they'll get all the data set and everything they're looking for from the portal but in the in the scenario that they can't they'll be able to jump from the portal um right over to their to their service so that's kind of the uh the journey where we're on right is is translating um a lot of what uh what we're doing um you know into into this portal ui uh all powered by by that that tkg infrastructure underneath yeah that's real nice i mean it's real it's really good to be able to see in one place you know when you even when you build in more services into here to be able to see um all of your services centrally located in a single single place what does the uh the dashboard look like then if this is the service view right yeah this is the service view um we don't the dashboard view today would be more for um we don't have a vcda dashboard this would be more for services if a partner wanted to see their specific maybe spend uh that they're doing or things that nature we haven't added um any of this over to to the dashboard um you know the the dashboard we're we're having discussions on um use cases and redefining the use of the dashboard versus services and and trying to to that way to target it a little bit where if you want service information we we kind of want you under under services um and going to specific services and then maybe dashboard will focus more on business metrics um you know spend invoicing maybe total number of partners things like that give them that that business information that lets them lets them know how how they are doing across green cloud services right so um so you obviously worked out um you know which instance to hear in a cloud cloud scenario with the uh like you said houston uh piece and the subscription name so programmatically the portal um application knows then to go and run a query to a specific instance of vcda and retreat data what about things like i i'm not sure if this this really matters for you guys whether you're actually charging for this but things like data transfers the volumes of data being transferred specific times are you charging for any additional things other than the the allocation of storage for this service um so if i was a a partner and i wanted to see the cost of my d-res service with green cloud what am i actually going to be looking at when i look at that other than than just the uh the consumption of storage and allocation of resources yeah i can take you over to the actual service order okay cool so here here's the service order right we obviously randomize the number tells us the account what's its status it's a demo so it's all zero dollar yeah but if i if i view the service order excuse me um you'll see the services up here and these are these are just you know the pricing depends on the partner level the rate plans things of that nature but you can see these are all the things we're billing for so we've got our our d-ras with vmware and you can see it's tied to the data center in houston i'm buying bandwidth i'm buying the storage buying the vmware licensing i'm reserving some compute which is at a discounted rate because it's it's reserved but not consumed yeah and then of course firewalls and nsx edge and then i just have a public ip and this is cloud to cloud so i've got my infrastructure running in our atlanta data center um and you can see i've got this similar looking uh uh we call these bundles um so you you'll have you know all you know you can see the difference is that you don't have um a vmware license right because that's on the other subscription so we we break it down pretty granular for them to pick and choose and build uh what it is they they might want to consume so if i wanted backup services over here in my is i would add a line that says um you know is backup and that would be uh you'd need to buy storage and you'd need to buy licensing for that right because because there's two charges for is backup so but this is how you would build a service order if this was from premise only into our cloud the is subscription would not be here we would only have a dras subscription because we don't need a source um subscription because it's on-prem and so we're not in control of that so that's how that would uh how we do that and just out of interest you um set the bandwidth in cloud director availability whereas that's when being done on the networking side so this would be an nsx edge so we would do that on on the edge in cloud director right through the through the api call right i get the api called a cloud director via nsx yeah okay cool and and we we do support um non-nsx based firewalls uh those for rate limiting we would do on the the the port in inside of the sphere right excellent so yeah i can see here then you've got a number of hooks into um basically into cloud direct availability with some additional kind of pieces into nsx um five uh cloud director right you're always calling the cloud director api directly yes yes yes yep so you can see this this total for this type this size would be 752.66 to the partner and then they would be able to put margin on top of that for for the service that they want to charge gives them flexibility with with what they want to do allows them to to make some points and do you go ahead and or are you capable of creating that bill you know the partner just wanted to use screen cloud and actually build a customer from this portal is there an ability to fill a partner to then add their own services and their own markup on top in some sort of customized way or do they always take this and yeah yeah yeah that we'll send the partner the invoice and then they'll they'll take it um right into their system we we can do um on a one-off basis some integrations um into some of their psa platforms that are out there um but but it's on a it's on a case-by-case basis for the partner we've had that question asked actually a number of times recently that that's one of those things much like you know what we talked about bundling things earlier we have a couple partners who do ask about it but for the most part you know 95 percent of the partners have some type of psa and billing system in place yeah so in reality i think probably what we're gonna ultimately end up doing is is enabling um those psa system integrations to to our engine to push into theirs type deal versus us versus us ingesting from them will push out to them since they've already got that infrastructure and those workflows in place and those in those processes we don't need to try and force them to change that yeah just pick a couple and uh you know get your certification for those done and off you go yeah that makes sense oh this is awesome okay great so um tanzu underneath um anything worthy of no in there is it just a an instance of tkgs um running by itself is there any other additional extras you mentioned earlier that um you know there may have been some um some shareware components in there what what does that tanzi stack look like so we've kind of adopted the the the piece parts that vmware uses um so we we've got the the tkg uh s running um we've got um istio running for some of the the service match we've got um flux we've prometheus grafana you know we've got all those piece parts running to complete the stack to enable us to kind of to kind of go forward uh where we're at today is um focusing on on purpose-built micro services and the next step of our journey will be focusing on uh micro services calling other micro services where we'll be building and focusing more on event driven um work workflows um so building the event bus and and all that and we we've got some i got it's escaping me the uh the name of the um uh security piece for uh authentication and authorization with the secrets to make sure that everything is communicating in a secure fashion and and proper authorization is happening um in authentication uh but the piece part it's a vmware um recommended uh part right so we're trying to our best for again supportability is huge for us uh we're not the largest dev team um so making sure that the platforms we're we're building and working with um we can be supported should we need um either guidance on on design decisions or we're having a problem with something and we need it resolved uh you know that's critical for us so yeah you know we look at what the vmware recommendation is um and most of the time i would say we go that route and there might be a couple times where where it's it just doesn't work for us but um that's not not very common yeah keeping it unless a specific reason keep it as uh as vanilla as you can as i suppose is the uh is the recommendation right um well justin listen thank you very much for showing us around this has been really interesting um i'm really excited to see how this progresses and you know what your kind of next uh next portal updates look like because i think it's going to be a very nice addition to your service let's say and being able to provide that centralized view for your partners you know is ultimately going to drive you more consumption which is i guess the end game um so yeah thank you very much yeah yeah i enjoyed it guy i appreciate it you have a good rest of your thursday or thursday here and um uh yeah we'll we'll go from there and we'll keep you updated too love to keep you guys up to date with what we're doing and how we're progressing along so yeah we'll have you back for a second round awesome cheers cheers thanks you

Channel: VMware Cloud Provider

Views: 10,124

Keywords: vmware, vsphere, tkg, tanzu vmware, tanzu kubernetes grid, tanzu kubernetes, tanzu application service, tanzu mission control, tanzu service mesh, green cloud defense, green cloud, partner portal

Id: Du2B-SarmXA

Length: 52min 10sec (3130 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021