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Comment by Covzire | Hacker News Reader

Now that you mention it, it's a little odd that VMware isn't used by any of the major cloud providers while they also haven't created their own Cloud Provider. It seems like they are very few hires away from a core competency in competing with at least GCP or Azure.

Makes me wonder why, is it because they see a big future yet in on-prem and can't really embrace cloud computing until that future looks less certain?

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Because cloud is commoditized VMs and VMware doesn’t have an edge in managing cattle at scale.

Their bread and butter is in managing pets and cloud providers expressly don’t want to encourage people to bring their pets into the cloud because people get mad when a few get killed.

OpenStack with the KVM backend is better than VMware at multi-tenancy so there really isn’t much value for VMware to add even over open source state of the art IaaS.

As someone who works for a non-major datacenter. We use VMware and have evaluated OpenStack. Lots of moving parts for OpenStack, administrative burden. So we don’t use OpenStack.

OpenStack, VMware and all the rest should go through a process that audits and certifies them like what is done to transport systems on and off the ground while not getting in the way of step level improvements introducing innovative new nicer things.

Once you start charging enterprise prices you can't stop, but public clouds can't pay enterprise prices. It would have appeared to be financial suicide for VMware to move downmarket into public cloud.

Enterprise costs are negotiable. I can easily imagine Google paying VMware several billion per year for a product they want. I can’t imagine Google using ESX — they want a product they fully control.

I don't believe any bigger cloud providers want to adopt closed unmodifiable products as a core. Windows/Hyper-V is similar from outside but it's in house for Azure(MS).

Even second-tier clouds that can't afford to develop their own hypervisor don't use ESX though. Literally no public clouds use it.

It's a bit less, er, cloudish and self-service than I usually think of cloud as being, but these folks do use VMware:

https://expedient.com/services/cloud/

The cloud is a capex game not a tech game. Also, the layer that VMware compete in, is fully commoditized (this is the infra as a service layer). The game is moving to higher layer (e.g. ML/ DB).

I think that for on-prem they faced a treat from containers, which they are embracing by betting the company on Kubernetes.

Vmware spent over a billion on their own cloud provider which failed utterly and the remnants were sold to Amazon.

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