Many companies are looking for a way to start moving application workloads to the cloud. Most of them want to find a solution that allows them to focus on managing the application workload and not its underlying infrastructure. The cloud is that solution, delivering the flexibility and scalability companies are looking for to gain business agility and increase innovation. From a consumption point of view, the cloud has changed the operating expenditure from CapEx, where you acquire, install, manage and upgrade the infrastructure yourself, to OpEx, where you pay for the service on a recurring interval and are not responsible for maintaining and upgrading the service.
This shift in how you purchase infrastructure and the fact that you are no longer responsible for the management of the infrastructure components, makes this type of solution more attractive to a lot of customers. A new solution that has gotten a lot of traction is VMware Cloud on AWS. It provides a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in the AWS cloud as a VMware service.
So what does that really mean?
VMware on AWS is a managed and instantly scalable implementation of VMware Cloud Foundation. It runs on bare metal servers in Amazon Web Services.
VMware Cloud on AWS bridges the gap between private and public clouds, enabling you to run applications in a hybrid environment based on VMware vSphere, with optimized access to AWS native services such as: S3, EBS, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS IoT, AWS Direct Connect, AWS IAM and more.
What does it include?
The VMware on AWS setup includes storage, network, licensing, support, upgrades and a lot more. VMware actually upgrades the entire stack for you for no additional costs. Support is also available via traditional methods or live chat with a 45 seconds response SLA. The offering allows you to securely access all workloads running natively on AWS, with no ingress or egress fees. Users have the ability to scale nodes as required on a per-minute basis, based on their workload demand. You can run VM workloads, or containers on the cloud, using either VMC on AWS, native AWS, or a mix of the two.
An Elastic Network Interface (ENI) dedicated to each physical host connects the VMware Cloud to the corresponding Availability Zone (AWS AZ) in the native AWS VPC.