Diamanti, a San Jose-based startup I last interviewed in February 2017, develops an innovative appliance solution that stands up a Kubernetes cluster running Docker containers in less than 15 minutes.  It's like your own enterprise container strategy in a box at a time when most IT shops are building DIY solutions with developers breathing down their necks that can take up to a year to run production workloads.  It's still early days for containers and that means it's still hard to do. 

I recently caught up with Diamanti CEO Jeff Chou to get his take on what major changes he sees in the VM and container industries for 2018.

VMblog:  What's the biggest change coming to VM architectures over the next year?

Jeff Chou:  We're now at the tipping point where it's mostly legacy dinosaur applications that run on VMware. It fits their business model. If you want to run modern scale-out apps, or data-driven apps or microservices then VMware is not a fit for you. If you believe in the movement to open source, scale-out, NoSQL, big data, and containers, you know that VMware is horrible at that. Containers are changing everything. To use an analogy, it's like dinosaurs and mammals. One is monolithic and the other is scale-out. One is heavy weight and the other is agile. And one is legacy and the other is the future.  Containers are the new virtualization technology.  VMware's business is about to get massively disrupted. Maybe they buy Docker in self defense?

VMblog:  So what comes next?

Chou:  All the new technologies being adopted in today's data center are developer drive. Open source is a perfect example. Containers are dev driven. Hadoop is dev driven. NoSQL is dev driven. The driving force behind all this is that business needs to move faster to accelerate innovation cycles to stay competitive. Developers are what is disrupting infrastructure technology today. That is why you have the term devops. You are bringing devs closer to ops. Ops wants to keep up with fast-moving devs. At Diamanti, we want to be the infrastructure for the new developer-driven world.

VMblog:  How does an appliance form factor play in this new world of containerized workloads?

Chou:  If you look at all the apps being developed now and going forward, most are based on open source or leverage open source, and all are containerized. That is how developers develop and get their apps to market as fast as possible. I like to use a music analogy to describe this trend to people unfamiliar with container technology. Applications are like music. You have developers creating apps like musicians create songs. Containers are the app format like the MP3 is the song format. To stretch the analogy, think about Kubernetes as serving a similar role as iTunes.  Kubernetes orchestrates deploying your apps like iTunes organizes and plays your media.  For people who want a complete solution for their media, they have their fully integrated solution with Apple - iPod/AppleTV, MP3s, and iTunes.  For developers and IT who want a complete solution for their apps, they have Diamanti.

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