VMware, Inc. and Vapor IO announced they are building a Multi-Cloud Services Grid that integrates the VMware Telco Cloud Platform with Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid platform, allowing developers and service operators to hypercompose grid services on-demand. The collaboration aims to greatly simplify and lower the costs of deploying distributed 5G systems and real-time applications by stitching together multiple cloud and edge environments into a unifying framework that can serve up resources for use, on-demand, across shared infrastructure.

"Today's internet is too static, too siloed, and too unpredictable to deploy latency-sensitive applications, such as immersive gaming," said Kaniz Mahdi, vice president of advanced technologies at VMware. "What we need, instead, is a grid that can virtualize and stitch together edge resources across multiple clouds and locations for any given set of latency and jitter constraints at any given time."

The Multi-Cloud Services Grid is the first planned implementation of an Open Grid system as envisioned by the Open Grid Alliance (OGA), where applications can request resources from the grid and then rely on the grid to assemble those resources. Hypercomposing, the act of delivering a tightly-coupled set of real-time resources on-demand, will make it possible to deliver network functions, applications, and services at the moment they are needed, deploying them autonomously and algorithmically across the Open Grid based on the needs of the application.

The Multi-Cloud Services Grid will hypercompose resources at the precise moment when the application needs to consume them. For example, if an application requests the fastest possible path across the least expensive resources, the grid will assemble those resources when the application requests them and dismantle them when the application is done using them - returning them back to the grid for the next use.

Underpinning the Multi-Cloud Services Grid is VMware's Telco Cloud Platform integration with Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid platform. It is designed to stitch-together workloads across a latency-driven edge-to-cloud continuum, enabling highly immersive and real-time applications, including AR/VR gaming and cloud robotics, as well as disaggregated 5G systems.

"Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid architecture, which connects across markets with Zayo's dark fiber backbone, gives us the potential to span the continental U.S. and become a platform to engage the full edge-to-core ecosystem," said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO. "The Vapor IO and VMware teams will deploy bedrock capabilities that serve the entire community, growing opportunities for providers and consumers across the entire stack. We want this to be the catalyst for other organizations to co-create and co-innovate with us, developing the new technologies and go-to-market business models that will enable us to collectively deploy the Open Grid at scale, worldwide."

The companies plan to deploy the technologies this year in Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Dallas, making the Multi-Cloud Services Grid available as a platform for crowdsourced innovation in those metropolitan areas. The deployed grids will have the ability to serve a growing ecosystem of communications service providers, cloud providers, infrastructure owners, hardware and software developers, municipalities, and enterprises looking to innovate with real-time applications.