VMware today added a bevy of services to its portfolio that make managing instances of its software running in a public cloud easier.
Additions to the VMware cloud portfolio include VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension Service for Private Cloud, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that enables IT organizations to employ a self-service portal to move workloads between public clouds in a way the minimizes downtime.
Other additions include the ability to apply both the Wavefront by VMware monitoring service and VMware Cost Insight Service against VMware Cloud on AWS, in addition to other public clouds. VMware has also added 45 integrations to expand the number of processes this SaaS application can monitor.
Finally, VMware has added a VMware Log Intelligence Service to provides access to real-time analytics of log data.
The arrival of these services coincides with the availability of VMware Cloud for AWS in the London region of AWS, which will be followed by the VMware stack becoming available in the Frankfurt, Germany, region of the AWS cloud.
Chris Wolf, vice president and CTO of global field and industry for VMware, said that as more organizations look to move out of data centers they operate, they are asking VMware to extend the mobility capabilities the company developed for its hypervisor into the public cloud. In fact, many of them are now moving to deploy VMware software across multiple clouds, he said.
Naturally, that expansion of VMware beyond the local data center is creating a raft of DevOps challenges, many of which the company is trying to address by making available a series of SaaS applications under the moniker VMware Cloud Services.
VMware is making a concerted effort to expand its DevOps portfolio at a time when many developers have shifted application workloads onto public clouds based on virtual machines other than VMware. Obviously, VMware has developed many partnerships with cloud service providers. But the number of VMware hypervisors running in public clouds remains a relatively small percentage of the total number of hypervisors. VMware is hoping that will change, however, once developers discover VMware hypervisors on public clouds, which in many cases can reduce the headaches associated with trying to manage hybrid clouds based on disparate hypervisors. As part of that overall strategy, VMware also has been aggressively embracing emerging cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes that can run anywhere.
Most enterprise IT organizations are still learning to walk when it comes to hybrid cloud computing. The most common use case is still disaster recovery. Most IT organizations are a long way from dynamically moving workloads between clouds. Most of the use cases for moving workloads initially will be confined to simply lifting a workload from an on-premises environment. But as IT organizations also gain more experience, soon there may be as many workloads moving between clouds as there are workloads moving between servers in a local data center.
