Analyst Insight Series: Virtualization virtue #3: Supporting application modernization

Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles From Tickets to Clicks: Driving Real Consumption in Your Self‑Service Private Cloud Analyst Insight Series: Virtualization virtue #3: Supporting application modernization VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 69 - Beyond vRA + NSX: Delivering Cloud-Native Networking with VCF 9 Virtual Private Clouds Guest post by Jean Atelsek, Senior Research Analyst,S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research This blog is the third in our series on the benefits and trends of virtualization (read blog#1 and blog#2 here) and a companion to the 451 Research Business Impact Brief “ The virtues of virtualization. ” Application modernization means different things to different people, but its universal goal is to make information technology more responsive to business needs. Virtualization – the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical machine – planted the seed for the cloud computing paradigm that underlies most modern software development, and it also represents a critical bridge between legacy environments and the container-based and AI-driven deployments revolutionizing how we interact with IT. What does a modern workload look like? Microservices-based architectures, which put software functionality in small, flexible and portable application containers, are one hallmark of cloud-native deployments. 451 Research expects this market to grow at a 15% CAGR to reach $18 billion by 2029. The boom in AI/ML-based workloads is a significant contributor to this forecast. One big challenge of deploying AI workloads is optimizing usage of the powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to efficiently run them. The latest GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel have been hard to come by due to high demand, and they are expensive when they do become available, with prices reaching up to $40,000 each. The last thing a company wants after provisioning such pricey silicon is to have it sitting idle in a data center waiting to produce a return on the investment. The versatility of virtual machines (VMs) lets organizations “sweat the assets” of their IT environment no matter how heterogeneous the devices supporting it. Decoupling applications from the underlying hardware makes it possible to run software seamlessly across different machines and operating systems. With modern workloads and larger datasets, precious GPU capacity can be accessed and shared more effectively because GPU functionality can be sliced up and distributed at scale to support a variety of programs.