We are excited to announce the next generation of Workspace ONE SaaS platform! The fundamental changes to the Workspace ONE architecture announced today already incorporate some of our recent advancements, such as the Freestyle Orchestrator, and will be the cornerstone of future VMware End User Computing (EUC) innovations.
A modern architecture will unlock significant performance and scale gains for customers—at least a 10x improvement in application and profile delivery, and smoother and easier management of devices.
The new cloud-native Workspace ONE SaaS architecture is designed to meet the needs of modern enterprises that require high performance, scalability, and security, while also helping VMware significantly increase the speed of feature development—delivering new and exciting capabilities to our customers with higher quality. Exciting features.
Why do we need architectural modernization improvements?
We believe that the ongoing evolution of where and how we use work devices, and the associated challenges, has led to the need for further improvements to the Workspace ONE architecture for the following reasons:
1. Explosive growth of diverse terminal devices and adoption rate of Workspace ONE in enterprises
We live in a multi-device world, where endpoint devices have become an important factor in keeping employees happy and increasing productivity. Over the past decade, we have seen tremendous growth in the number of mobile and desktop devices managed and secured by Workspace ONE. While the diversity of endpoint devices scales horizontally, the number of endpoints per customer of ours also grows vertically. This clearly requires a more robust architecture to achieve performance at scale and thrive with increasing endpoint complexity.
2. New business challenges require new solutions
Over the years, Workspace ONE has continuously driven innovation in end-user computing: from the evolution of MDM to EMM to UEM, to meeting the increasing demands of digital employee experience and zero trust security, Workspace ONE solutions have always been at the forefront. But to continue to do so in the future, we must move on from the path that got us here to a path of new, infinite engineering scale and innovative possibilities.
3. The Evolving Field of Terminal Technology
As the UEM market matured, we recognized the commoditization of basic device management functionality and quickly addressed higher-level functionality with faster feature delivery speed and quality to create customer value on a priority basis. One example is the shift in management paradigm from an "imperative" to a "declarative" cloud management model.
what did we do
Our EUC team embarked on a difficult but rewarding quest to redefine the vision of modern architecture for decades to come.
This vision will enable Workspace ONE to deliver unprecedented customer value. Organizations deploying Workspace ONE will be able to scale their deployments to millions of devices while gaining extreme performance for resource workloads, as well as automation and analytics capabilities that prioritize business outcomes over IT tasks.
1. Refactor monolithic applications into modern microservices
The first step in the process involved redesigning Workspace ONE UEM's monolithic architecture. This requires abstracting traditional functionality and creating new self-contained, modular, loosely coupled microservices that deliver high performance, scalability, and quality.
In fact, it was this "underlying" refactoring of microservices that drove one of the first "modern" solutions we launched a few years ago: Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator.
But this is just the beginning. The vision for the new service architecture is to be the cornerstone of all future innovations in the Workspace ONE platform. As a customer, you'll see this in aspects of endpoint management, experience, and security such as Windows desktop multi-user management, Linux endpoint management, new OS updates, vulnerability management, and more.
2. Embracing Desired State Management: A New Management and Security Paradigm
Traditionally, endpoint management has been largely “imperative” based, requiring a series of different instructions to achieve the final desired state of the device. Simply put, in order to install an application on a device, a series of instructions are passed in order to reach the final state where the application is installed. With the modernization of the platform, we embarked on a different path of Desired State Management (DSM, Desired State Management).
DSM is not a new concept. In fact, it is a well-established model in server configuration management where the focus of management is not on the instruction set but on the high-level state of the device itself.
Workspace ONE is now designed to understand the desired state of equipment, and when it detects that a device has deviated from the desired state, it immediately performs the necessary tasks to restore the device to the desired state. This computation can be performed on the client side (desktop) for low-latency, offline corrections (if possible), or on the server side for lightweight endpoints (mobile). This new paradigm shift opens up huge opportunities for better security, device compliance, and even more simplified device management.
Now, thanks to Apple's declarative management and Google's AMAPI, we're excited to anticipate this evolution from imperative to declarative management models. We're proud to start an early refactoring to comfortably embrace this exciting new world.
What benefits can customers gain from this new Workspace ONE architecture?
Clients will gain many benefits from the new modern architecture, some examples below.
1. Super performance and scalability
With the new Workspace ONE architecture, enterprises can expect to see significant improvements in performance. The architecture is designed to handle high volumes of traffic and users, ensuring IT can deliver applications and services quickly and efficiently. Architecture modernization will deliver at least a 10x improvement in application and profile delivery, and at least a 10x improvement in the administrator experience through smoother device management capabilities and seamless screen loading in seconds, even with millions of devices environment is also possible.
2. Faster feature delivery and higher product quality
A service-based architecture allows our engineering teams to dramatically increase their ability to develop and deploy self-contained modular services. Test coverage, automation, and low dependencies between services lead to higher product quality. This new architecture will also allow us to decouple specific functionality and update it in a modular fashion to support same-day support. For example, a data-driven profile-based UI will enable our customers to present any new same-day support features with a simple refresh through the browser console interface (without requiring a full upgrade to Workspace ONE UEM).
3. Powerful low-code capabilities, advanced security features, and innovation
The concept of Workspace ONE continuously maintaining the desired state of the device will unlock huge opportunities for advanced security and natively enforced device compliance in the future. Combining DSM with the low-code orchestration capabilities provided by Freestyle Orchestrator will provide end-user computing IT teams with a powerful toolkit to solve previously incomprehensible high-level business problems. This new architecture will also be the basis for new innovations -- including Microsoft Windows updates and multi-user capabilities, Linux management, Google's AMAPI and Apple's declarative management.
When will we see the modern Workspace ONE architecture and it in action?
The SaaS UAT environment will begin rolling out new architecture and performance improvements in the first half of 2023. Production shared SaaS and dedicated SaaS environments will begin rolling out new architecture and performance improvements in the second half of 2023. All new innovative products built on the new architecture will launch shortly after the above timeline.
Content Source｜Public Account: VMware China R&D Center