Cloud business is changing – VMware CTO talks about ‘decentralization’ ZDNet Japan

Enterprise blockchains are still experimental, but they have the potential to change the way applications and systems are designed. Common architectures can shift from those managed by individual companies to those in which applications and data are shared with multiple organizations. In other words, true decentralized computing (I used the term “decentralized” to distinguish it from “distributed” which is distributed).

There are many cloud service providers, but there are many other enterprise data centers. And these data centers house vast amounts of underutilized computing resources. This underutilized resource has the potential to flatten the cloud ecosystem.

VMware Chief Technology Officer (CTO)Kit Colbertpredicts a much more decentralized future. I had the opportunity to speak with Colbert at VMware’s Explore conference in San Francisco from August 29th to September 1st. He talked about several factors that could lead to the opening of enterprise IT.

An emerging scenario is the commercialization of applications built using blockchain technology (distributed ledger technology), a technology that enables trust between multiple participants. “Enterprise blockchain is very much what we’re aiming for,” he said.

Distributed applications created and run by cloud-native Kubernetes-based building blocks are now widespread. Recently, however, he noted that the trend is shifting from creating decentralized environments to creating decentralized environments. A decentralized architecture relies on a single organization, while a decentralized architecture relies on multiple organizations.

The two architectures are similar in that they are environments supporting multiple application instances and a shared database. “The big difference is that in a decentralized architecture, instead of a single company running these instances, multiple companies work together,” says Colbert.

But these organizations “probably can’t fully trust each other” and “blockchain technology is what makes these kinds of use cases possible,” Colbert continued.

VMware currently doesn’t have many decentralized systems using blockchain technology, but Colbert expects to see more as the technology develops.