The Curious Case of vCloud Director and the Perils of Over-Engineering
Back in December 2011 , I wrote what many considered a borderline heretical blog post: a prediction that VMware vCloud Director, that shining paragon of private cloud orchestration, would not thrive in the following five years. At the time, I was accused of being overly skeptical, anti-vCloud, and even of being secretly on AWS’s payroll. (Spoiler: I wasn’t. Though I wouldn’t have minded the stock options.) Now that it’s August 2016 , I figured it’s only fair to revisit that time capsule of cynicism and ask: Was I right? Well, grab your favorite performance dashboard, because the data doesn’t lie. Let’s tally up the results. What I Warned in 2011 Just to refresh your memory (and my ego), here’s the TL;DR of what I said five years ago: vCloud Director was too complex for most enterprises. It was designed more for telcos and service providers , not your average enterprise IT shop. It introduced too many layers of abstraction , distancing users from the physical in...