Design Principles

We've built Private Cloud Director with these design principles.

Familiar, Virtualization First Experience

We are a product built by VMware engineers, for virtualization administrators. We believe that virtualization must be the bedrock of any modern private cloud platform. That virtualization must be implemented as a first class citizen, and presented without complex abstractions that create complexity. We've utilized our decades of experience working at VMware to build a Private Cloud Platform with a familiar user experience compared to what you are accustomed to with your traditional virtualization interface.

Integration and Interoperability with Existing Hardware

We aim to be broadly compatible with all major server, storage, and network investments in use by enterprises.

We believe that one of the core value propositions of private clouds is that for most businesses, there are existing hardware investments of diverse makes and generations. Often, this hardware is partially depreciated, reducing its operational costs.

We strive to allow our customers to sweat their existing hardware assets, and to do so, we prioritize interoperability and a wide HCL. We strive for our HCL to include all Enterprise Linux compatible hardware, and will degrade features gracefully when niche hardware capabilities are unavailable.

Opinionated Design and UX

We are inspired by beautifully designed products that simplify end-user operations. While built on powerful open-source technologies, we aim to make these technologies simpler to learn, deploy, and operate at scale.

Private Cloud Director will strive to simplify cloud operations and management for IT and platform engineering teams, while ensuring critical control elements are available.

For instance, to provide the best possible experience, we may abstract away lower-level APIs and controls in the underlying technology, offering a higher-level abstraction. At other times, we may make simplifying assumptions that reduce semantic complexity.

This opinionated design will be done in a manner that retains upstream API compatibility, but we may introduce additional APIs - via composition - to support our design philosophy.

We design for IT operations teams and platform engineering teams as the Administrator user, who will then optionally invite other administrator users, as well as DevOps teams and developer teams as self-service users.

Curated Technologies

Private Cloud Director is built using best of breed open source components under the hood, that are then coupled with our IP for enterprise readiness. Open-source projects vary widely in their maturity and readiness for enterprise usage. We select projects and technologies with a view to ensuring the following, in priority order:

1. Projects that can help us deliver a deterministic, highly available experience that enterprises can depend upon (when used with our proactive operations model)

2. Projects that have broader customer interest, vendor participation, and that are not single-vendor technologies

3. Projects that have either achieved maturity or are likely to achieve maturity due to a growing contributor base

Cloud Completeness via Extensions

A long-standing challenge with private clouds has been their lack of the breadth of features available from public cloud providers. We are clear-eyed about the amount of effort required to match the features and services of hyperscale public clouds; yet, we are ambitious about making private clouds competitive and more attractive to developers.

Our approach to achieving Cloud Completeness will be to build foundational platform features, such as critical Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities, and to leverage the ecosystem of open-source technologies, including Kubernetes operators, to enable a broader range of higher-level application services.