It might tickle you to learn of Project Pacific, an upcoming rewrite of VMware to run seamlessly on Kubernetes by default, with an upgrade path for existing installations
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?
Any idea what VMwares motivation is?
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.
You didn't specify what the hardware cost you, nor what it would cost someone else to buy new and how it compares to cloud servers. Add to that lack of redundancy, having to do hardware maintenance yourself, no add-on services unless you run and manage them yourself, no flexibility in scaling up or down, etc.
IT is probably perfect for your use-case, but not for the use case of the people who choose the cloud.
For clarity's sake, my setup cost ~$10k, and includes a 12TB ZFS NAS server, a 10GBe back end, 2 ESXi hosts totaling 16 cores, 256GB. It also took many weekends to set up (and labor isn't cheap).
The uplink is mere Comcast, and, at 30Mbps, does not come close to rivaling a cloud offering. Also, I'm unable to scale as fast as the cloud (think weeks instead of minutes).
On the positive side, for those of us who love infrastructure, there's nothing like running your own, very small, cloud.
Disclosure: I work for VMware.