Wow, it has been a LOOONG time. And what a change it has been for me.
First of all, I want to acknowledge the massive number of layoffs that has occurred in the last few years in the technology sector, including IT. Many friends, partners, and professional colleagues lost their jobs in the last two years. I wish everyone the best and I hope you all land in a better place!
I believe the technology sector will never return to it’s former glory where companies spent a lot of money for perks like cushy travel budgets and full office pantries. We need to accept that. I also hear that compensation has taken a drastic step back as companies do not value the skill set as much given the AI driven capabilities today.
Employers are demanding much more from us than in previous years. And I am no different in that regard. So let’s talk about what I’m up to and what’s coming!
Through all the changes, my role has evolved into one where my product management responsibilities cover configuration management throughout the VCF stack, Salt from within VCF, Salt from outside of VCF (the former SaltStack Enterprise platform), and the open source Salt Project. In short, I’m the VCF Configuration Management PM AND I am the Salt PM now (I miss my Salt PM counterpart a lot! =~()
One reason for my silence has been the stealth work I’ve been doing for the VMware division for the last two years. That work was finally included in the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 release that happened on May 12th, 2026. We built the underpinnings and foundation for connecting the VMware stack. The first capability these underpinnings will give you come in the form of a new compliance engine and configuration management framework that you will see through the VMware Operations platform.
The previous Operations Compliance Management pack was based on alerts and symptoms, was not 100% complete in terms of coverage, and did not offer remediation. The newly developed Secure Posture Management service provides 100% coverage for PCI for VCF, VMware Security Configuration Guide, a solid bunch of the most requested configuration settings grouped under VCF General Controls AND REMEDIATION AT SCALE. The Ops UI developed by my VCF Compliance counterpart was a wonderful addition and really helped introduce the world of compliance and standards in a industry opinionated fashion that provides a way to use benchmarks the way they were intended to and provides the method to report and remediate in one place.
I liked it so much that I asked for the same experience for the workload benchmarks that are offered in the VMware Salt platform (Aria Automation Config for those in the know ….). 😉
Behind the scenes, this Secure Posture Management service is fully backed by VMware’s embedded implementation of Salt. This implementation can be seen only through the VCF Fleet Management service platform since it runs there but is not accessible for clients. So no, you cannot manage VCF components with Salt the way you manage workloads like Windows and Linux.
Quite frankly, you may never have functional parity since VMware appliances are proprietary platforms.
Having said that, the intent is to slowly release the rachet on those Salt capabilities someday. That some day will come sooner than later. 🙂
The 9.1 capabilities were the first things I wanted to share since it was related to the VCF 9.1 release. Let’s be honest. You all were waiting for 9.1 before rolling it out anyways! And boy o boy, was it ever worth the wait! I feel like the car mechanic that built the engine under the hood.
The next piece of work I will share is related to rebooting the open source Salt Project. It’s no secret that it is the open source edition of the Salt Project that is a major part of the commercial Salt Raas (Returner as a Service) platform. The Salt Minions planted on the endpoints and the Salt Master control plane are the core of the Salt solution while the Salt Raas Platform integrates all the open source pieces into an enterprise service with APIs, UI’s, reporting and more.
I am learning about open source and I’m learning that it is driven by the community. For us to re-engage, we need to start contributing and I’m happy to report there is a renewed focus on open source contributions. It’s early but the moves we are making are all related to re-organizing the Open Salt website for better navigation, developing relevant content, and seeing how to provide the right functionality to the community. We know we need better documentation. We know we need to refresh some of the extension modules. You will start seeing us tackle these topics bit by bit.
One of the most exciting things I can share is that our rock star Salt engineers have done a full refresh of the VMware Salt Extension modules! You now have a massive laundry list of functions that those extension modules will allow you to perform against the VCF stack. You need to check it out if you want to programmatically manage VCF! I want you to point your AI tool of choice at the VMware Salt extension modules and documentation and have it build your Salt states to execute your logic! It really is THAT easy!
I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to be the Salt PM because this software is heads and shoulders above what’s on the market today. And it’s freakin FREE open source! You cannot beat that. It can do all the workload endpoints and now it can do VCF! For FREE! Ha ha. How do you NOT LIKE FREE?!
You know what’s better than FREE?
The fact that the work we do is not dependent on VMware software releases! =O Hence my rock star Salt engineers simply did the work and dropped it casually in Git….
There’s more coming..
There is so much in my pipeline of things to come and they are all so exciting that I really can’t wait to share more. Make sure to stay tuned!