Kathy Gibson is at VMware Explore in Barcelona – As businesses move to multi-cloud, virtualisation at the cloud level will be the glue that integrates workloads and applications.
“The multi-cloud journey is real,” says Lorna Hardie, senior director of VMware Sub-Saharan Africa. “The way out of cloud chaos is to choose the right cloud for each application.”
This is made possible by effectively virtualising the cloud environment, by creating a hypervisor across the cloud, says Ian Jansen van Rensburg, director: solutions engineering and lead technologist at VMware South Africa.
“For modern apps, we need to have a new level of virtualisation that does away with the operating system,” he explains. “This new environment will run on containers, using Kubernetes and Tanzu.”
The watchword for 2023 and the future of IT is going to be integration, Jansen van Rensburg explains. “This is going to be the most important trend.”
VMware believes its announcements around Aria are going to be key. “Aria is going to be our next virtualisation tool, or hypervisor in the cloud.
“If you can virtualise hardware, you can virtualise the cloud – and we are going to do exactly that with Aria. It is probably one of the biggest things that VMware has announced in a long time.
“It is how we will interlink and integrate all the clouds for any application, for any users – be they developers, the enterprise, or on the network. The Aria portfolio of products is going to allow VMware to create that hypervisor layer for cloud.
“It is the tool that will let users log in to to view any app, any container, any VM on any cloud. They can do this from one single console, where they can also view usage and spend, with management and control.”
VMware describes Aria as a multi-cloud management portfolio that provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud-native applications across any cloud.
VMware Aria enables true multi-cloud management based on comprehensive, near realtime visibility into customers’ application and infrastructure environments.
It was designed to support cloud-native apps and public cloud assets, including the large scale of objects, the high rate of change, the fragmentation of operational data, and the proliferation of APIs across clouds.
“This is a major tool for us that will help our customers move to the multi-cloud world,” Jansen van Rensburg says.
At VMware Explore this week, VMware announced new advancements to its VMware Tanzu cloud native app portfolio and VMware Aria cloud management platform to deliver a cloud-smart approach to cloud native application development, delivery, and management that supports customers at every step of their journey, across any Kubernetes and across any cloud.
“We know that no two application modernisation journeys are alike, and organisations need freedom to select the right cloud, software artifacts, and services, for the right application, based on those individual application needs. But as businesses expand to new clouds to leverage unique services, the lack of skilled developers, Kubernetes expertise, security, compliance, and management complexity of operating across clouds are often cited as leading challenges,” says Ajay Patel, senior vice-president and GM: modern apps and management business group at VMware.
“Platform teams need solutions that enable developer velocity, establish standard guardrails, and implement secure software pipelines to accelerate time to value, empower self-service, while unifying visibility and management to capitalise on the benefits of multi-cloud. Today’s enhancements across VMware Tanzu, VMware Image Builder, and VMware Aria portfolios represent the latest milestone in VMware’s commitment to supporting our customers’ unique transformations with intelligent, holistic tools that deliver greater flexibility, consistency, and choice.”
Open source is at the core of enterprise innovation with rapid adoption across enterprises in development, but use in production has slowed due to concerns on addressing security and lifecycle management, as reported in VMware’s State of Secure Supply Chain Survey 2022.
VMware’s State of Kubernetes report found that more than 40% of respondents utilise hybrid cloud models and 52% choose multiple public cloud vendors – revealing the state of cloud chaos many organisations are working to navigate. VMware’s Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations helps teams enable the right Kubernetes environment anywhere while standardising and simplifying the management and security of those applications and environments.
This week, VMware is also announcing updates to key components of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations – including VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, VMware Tanzu Mission Control, and VMware Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced edition – to optimise operations for any Kubernetes at scale, running on any cloud or at the edge, and helping customers achieve faster development cycles and time to market for the workloads their business depends on.
The new VMware Tanzu enhancements make Kubernetes optimised for edge environments, provide consistent Kubernetes management to on-prem, air-gapped environments, and bring Kubernetes operations to more public clouds.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 introduces support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in addition to existing support for AWS, Azure, and vSphere, giving customers even more flexibility and consistency in deployments along their multi-cloud journeys.
VMware has also announced a new initiative to design and offer self-managed, private deployments of VMware Tanzu Mission Control, which provides automated, policy-driven management and security support to customers as they scale Kubernetes cluster deployments.
Customers that must operate in on-premises and air-gapped environments can benefit from full control of their entire fleet of clusters and network infrastructure connectivity. In addition to these updates, Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced will include additional capabilities to allow operators to automatically discover Kubernetes clusters, enable onboarding of those clusters for secure connectivity, and take advantage of new GitOps support to further unify operations with Kubernetes clusters.
As IT teams accelerate app development and leverage a multi-cloud environment, platform teams must increasingly rely on cost, performance, security, and configuration data – often sitting in disparate tools – to understand the complete characteristics of the application that they are building. New enhancements to VMware’s Tanzu portfolio are complemented by new and expanded VMware Aria capabilities for cloud native application and multi-cloud management.
VMware Aria Graph, announced a couple of months ago, is a graph-based data store technology that provides a near realtime map of applications and clouds with management insights from customers’ existing VMware Aria solutions, as well as federated third-party management tools.
VMware Aria Graph is available within VMware Aria Hub, a new platform that provides centralised views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment.
Together, the VMware Aria portfolio, including VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph, deliver app-aware management to native public clouds and hybrid clouds that can empower customers to address challenges that span discipline, tools, and teams.
This week, VMware announced the initial availability of a new free offering of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. This new free tier offering will enable customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts in either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
The freemium offering will allow users to understand the relationships of their resources to other resources, policies, and other key components in their cloud environments.
Additional free functionality will include visibility into CIS benchmark violation data coming from VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds, as well as list-price costing for resources coming from VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth.
With the free tier, customers will be able to manually curate applications to better understand dependencies and relationships of their business applications. Initial availability of this freemium offering is expected in VMware’s Q4 FY23. VMware is also announcing the Beta availability of VMware Aria Migration.
VMware Aria Migration is a new end-to-end service that can leverage VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph to accelerate and simplify the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution.