It’s been less than a year since the strategic partnership between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) was revealed in October 2016, but the companies are unveiling big news at VMWorld in Las Vegas this week.
VMware has announced that its cloud services are now available on AWS in an effort to help its customers better leverage a hybrid cloud environment using familiar VMWare software while also gaining access to AWS’s wide range of services.
Initially available in the AWS US West (Oregon) region as an hourly on-demand basis, the companies promised that VMware Cloud on AWS will expand to all global AWS regions by the end of 2018 and include one and three-year subscriptions.
Ideal for customers “looking to migrate applications to the public cloud, develop entirely new applications, extend the capacity of their data centres for existing applications, or quickly provision development and test environments,” VMware Cloud on AWS is being delivered as an easily scalable, agile service that can reduce operational costs.
The partnership encourages functional cloud migration, portability, and increases IT efficiency, while providing the right tools to manage private and public cloud environments for better productivity.
“VMware and AWS are empowering enterprise IT and operations teams to add value to their businesses through the combination of VMware enterprise capabilities and the breadth and depth of capabilities and scale of the AWS Cloud, providing them a platform for any application,” Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer at VMware, says. “VMware Cloud on AWS gives customers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud that delivers the same architecture, capabilities, and operational experience across both their vSphere-based on-premises environment and AWS.”
VMware Cloud on AWS, which is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, the unified software-defined data centre (SDDC) platform that integrates several of the company’s virtualization technologies, allows customers the flexibility to choose where to run applications based on business needs. It means faster times to value, the ability to scale host capacity up or down in a few minutes, and set up an entire VMware SDDC in under a couple hours. It will also support containerized workloads and DevOps services.
“With the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time customers can operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment that combines the VMware software they love with the unmatched functionality, security, and operational expertise of the AWS Cloud,” explains Andy Jassy, chief executive officer at AWS. “The majority of the world’s enterprises have virtualized their data centres with VMware, and now these customers can easily move applications between their on-premises environments and AWS without having to purchase any new hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operations.”
Pricing details have yet to be shared. Early customers include Accenture, Adidas, Moody’s, and Symantec, but the solution will be rapidly expanded to “hundreds of thousands of partners” of both VMWare and AWS, according to Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of products and cloud platforms at VMware.
Rajiv Doshi, senior vice president of infrastructure services at Moody’s, congratulates the companies on their partnership and says the offering “has the potential to help enable public cloud adoption for companies that are significantly virtualized on the VMware platform.”
He adds that VMware Cloud on AWS “offers many features that we’ve been waiting to use in our infrastructure, and provides a way to ease bi-directional portability, extend our use of VMware’s SDDC capabilities and drive colocation with AWS core services and use AWS’s native technologies from the VMware cloud on AWS with minimal latency. Additionally, the VMware Cloud on AWS provides us with a good landing spot for migrating workloads that are not yet cloud ready.”
Jack Sepple, senior managing director of cloud and operations at Accenture, says this partnership allows the company to “craft the optimal journey to cloud for our clients that optimizes their use of private/hybrid/public cloud and accelerates their ability to achieve positive business outcomes such as agility, innovation and ROI.”
