Software-Defined Architectures That Deliver Impact Today a software-defined architecture leverages logical infrastructure services that are abstracted from, as opposed to integrated with, the underlying hardware. Several of today’s largest technology companies in the Internet and social network space leverage this approach to drive aggressive cost savings and improve manageability for certain types of workloads. These hyperscale architectures use commodity hardware components, which are then combined with proprietary technologies such as custom applications, platforms, and containers. The final service. For example, social media and proprietary public cloud service—is then provided to customers. However, for the SDDC to be most applicable to enterprises, it must meet four key requirements—key pillars of the VMware architecture for the SDDC: First, it must run traditional applications, without re-architecting them, in addition to cloud-native applications. Second, it must enable ...