VMware today announced it has extended its alliance with Equinix to launch a managed distributed cloud service that runs instances of its cloud computing platform in hosted IT environments.
Announced at the VMware Explore 2022 Europe conference, the VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal service takes advantage of more than 240 Equinix data centers in 71 major metro areas around the world to deploy instances of the VMware Cloud platform running atop the company’s virtual machine software.
Narayan Bharadwaj, vice president of cloud solutions at VMware, said this VMware service extends the scope and reach of the company’s multi-cloud computing strategy beyond the scope of the major hyperscalers and traditional on-premises IT environments.
The goal is to provide a managed IT environment that provides an alternative for deploying latency-sensitive applications closer to the network edge where data can be processed and analyzed in near-real-time, he noted. In addition, Equinix’s hosted IT environment also makes it possible for IT teams to more easily comply with requirements in highly regulated industries.
It’s not clear what percentage of applications today are running in managed hosted environments versus a public cloud or local data center. But as more organizations decide not to operate data centers themselves, many of them are discovering managed hosting services are preferable to the cloud for reasons spanning everything from application performance and cost and security to compliance.
In some cases, organizations are determining that certain classes of longer-running applications initially deployed in the cloud are actually less expensive to run in an on-premises IT environment, noted Bharadwaj. A managed hosting option often provides the flexibility benefits of the cloud at a lower cost for those applications, he added.
As cloud computing evolves, it’s become apparent that IT is becoming more distributed than ever. Many organizations are finding they now have a mix of applications running on public clouds, in co-location facilities and traditional on-premises IT environments. The challenge is that with each new platform employed to run applications, the total cost of managing IT increases. Regardless of any potential infrastructure cost savings, each platform typically requires a set of dedicated specialists to master the frameworks need to manage it. In fact, the single biggest IT expense remains the cost of labor. VMware is making a case for a familiar IT framework that can be deployed anywhere to rein in those costs.
DevOps, of course, was created to provide a new approach to automating the management of IT at scale. However, DevOps continues to be employed unevenly, largely because there are not enough IT professionals with the programming skills required to successfully manage IT-as-code. Managed services are gaining traction because, in most cases, they shift the responsibility for managing DevOps workflows onto a vendor such as VMware.
It remains to be seen just how automated the management of IT will become in the months and years ahead. However, it’s apparent that, in the era of the cloud, more organizations are opting to rely on third parties to manage infrastructure so they can devote more resources to building and deploying applications.