I get the idea of GCP to play in the 'VMware <-> cloud arena', but I do not get Project Pacific.
Is VMware developing it because their installed base shrinks as people are moving to bare metal K8s and they simply need to counter that? Or is is there some other benefit such as retiring some parts of their codebase e.g. replacing VSAN by CSI?
Lots of large places are looking at Kubernetes as a way to reduce provider lock-in. Being able to sit down with the CIO and say you have a great migration path for their on-premise setup and it can seamlessly manage cloud workloads is a really nice pitch.
Google theoretically has a similar pitch with Anthos but they’re really not good at sales and GCP has a lot of basic catch-up to do in most areas other than GKE. Say what you will about VMware, they know how to sell effectively and don’t ignore features which aren’t cool CS problems.
The simplified version is that VMware is doing Pacific/etc to stay relevant in a world where virtualization is being commoditized, and where containers will eventually rule most workloads.
