VMware Cloud on AWS

Recently Amazon and VMware announced a close working partnership. Believe it or not Amazon AWS will be providing dedicated hardware/infrastructure to run VMware hypervisors, which will be managed by VMware. According to publications I have read thus far mid-2017 VMware will release their SDDC (software-defined data center) Amazon AWS resource offerings. No pricing or detailed offerings have been released to the public as of date. Personally I think there are several reasons to get excited about this partnership/offering and below I have named some that come to mind.

Reasons to Consider:

1. Many companies have held off migrating workloads to the cloud for one reason or another. In many situations the legacy applications have no in-house IT tribal knowledge/documentation left, no source code or installers available and no external support to be successful in a move to the cloud. If that legacy application in question is deployed on VMware technology already you can move that application seamlessly. Disclaimer: Keep in mind if the legacy application has inbound/outbound data interfaces to other in-house applications not moving you will need to consider overall latency and end-to-end performance to name a couple.
   
2. Current IT staff may not be fluent with external cloud provider technologies/services and require a talent transformation (Training). Again if you are a current VMware shop your teams will be familiar with the toolsets they have been using for years and can begin learning other AWS services.
   
3. Move your test/dev environments to free up your local production hardware resources.
   
4. Production scaling with a hybrid approach that will now be easier to accomplish as you will not need to purchase additional on-premise hardware (CAPEX Savings!).
   
5. Disaster Recovery could be a great use of this offering, but solid architecture planning will be key to your overall success.
   
6. Get OUT of the hardware business and that aging computer room you call a “Data Center”.
   

Now I am not suggesting you run out and move everything to an outside CSP, but careful consideration should be taken when reviewing providers. In my opinion partnerships like this one are key to cloud adoption for the organizations that have been hesitant about the cloud.

-Daren