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.