For as long as I’ve been in the tech industry—and trust me, that’s longer than I care to count—we’ve heard the same song: “Build once, run anywhere.” It’s a catchy tune, but the reality has always been a little off-key. Whether it’s dealing with differing cloud providers, unique on-prem hardware, or the wild west of the edge, platform engineers have been the unsung heroes trying to duct-tape it all together.
But with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, we might finally be seeing that tune hit its high note. This isn’t just another upgrade. This is the beginning of something much bigger—a tangible step toward true infrastructure abstraction, and platform engineers are taking notice.
One Platform. Any Environment.
At its core, VCF 9.0 delivers what every platform engineer dreams about: a standardized, consistent infrastructure platform that can be deployed across multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private data centers, co-location facilities, and even edge environments.
Think about what that means. No more rewriting automation scripts or tweaking deployment pipelines for every new environment. No more explaining to your dev team why the app behaves differently in QA (on-prem) than it does in production (AWS or Azure). With VCF 9.0, your infrastructure looks and feels the same wherever it lives.
This is the kind of foundational consistency that platform engineering was built for.
The End of Frankenstein Platforms
We’ve all been there—assembling a “platform” out of mismatched tools, disjointed APIs, and overlapping responsibilities. That patchwork approach slows down everything: development, testing, DevOps, and ultimately, time-to-value.
VCF 9.0 isn’t a patch. It’s a platform. It embraces the latest in cloud-native architecture and Kubernetes-based modern apps while still supporting traditional workloads. It’s a full-stack solution that helps you abstract away the chaos and lets you focus on building value, not wrangling infrastructure.
For developers and DevOps teams, that’s a breath of fresh air. For platform engineers, it’s like finally being handed the right tools for the job.
Hypervisor Abstraction Realized
When hypervisors first hit the scene, the promise was simple: decouple workloads from the underlying hardware. In practice, it kind of worked—but not nearly to the extent we hoped. What we needed was platform-level abstraction—not just VMs, but a whole application delivery ecosystem that runs consistently no matter where it’s deployed.
That’s what VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 starts to unlock.
It’s the first time we can truly say that the infrastructure becomes a non-factor for most of what developers and application teams care about. That means more time spent building features and less time debugging environment-specific issues. It means faster testing, easier staging, and more reliable production deployments.
It means freedom.
The Platform Engineer’s Role Evolves
Now, let’s be clear: VCF 9.0 isn’t a magic wand. You don’t just install it and walk away. It gives platform engineers a solid, consistent substrate, but the real work is just beginning. Layering on developer self-service, observability, policy enforcement, cost optimization, and now increasingly, AI-specific capabilities—that’s still in the platform engineer’s wheelhouse.
But with the foundation standardized, the platform team can shift their focus away from fixing plumbing and toward enabling productivity and innovation. That’s the kind of strategic work that moves the needle.
One Platform to Rule Them All?
The phrase “one platform to rule them all” might sound like marketing fluff—but when you dig into what Cloud Foundation 9.0 offers, it starts to feel pretty real.
In a world where cloud providers want to lock you into their services, VMware—ironically—might be offering a way out. With VCF 9.0, you can build and run your stack the same way, no matter where it’s deployed. Want to go all-in on AWS today? Great. Need to shift to Azure or GCP tomorrow? No problem. Still have legacy apps in your own data center? Covered.
Vendor lock-in has always been the lurking monster in the multi-cloud world, but VMware may have figured out how to tame it. And that should have every platform engineer sitting up and paying attention.
Dive Deeper: Join the Virtual Showcase
Techstrong Group and Tech Field Day are partnering with Broadcom to host a virtual deep dive event into VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 on July 29th. If you’re a platform engineer, cloud architect, or anyone trying to standardize and scale application platforms, this is your chance to go beyond the brochure.
You’ll get insights into what’s new, what’s next, and how organizations are already using Cloud Foundation 9.0 to transform their environments.
Register Here: techstrongevents.com/vmware-cloud-foundation-9-showcase
Final Thoughts
Who would’ve thought that using VMware—yes, that VMware—would be the path to avoiding lock-in, accelerating cloud-native adoption, and empowering platform engineers to finally deliver on the vision of “build once, run anywhere”?
But that’s where we are. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is here, and platform engineers love it—for good reason.
This isn’t just a product release. It’s a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern IT. And it’s one you don’t want to miss.