As pretty well any IT person knows, VMware is the leader and industry standard in hypervisor technology. Companies have been building and running applications in their own data centers using the VMware vSphere hypervisor for years. The tools are mature, staff are highly trained managing VMware workloads, and companies understand how to manage security, maintain compliance, and ensure their company’s critical business applications stay up and running.
Public cloud technology has turned this world of company-owned data centers on its head. For better or worse, public clouds are here to stay and see growing adoption from business. There are so many advantages to public clouds that companies can no longer ignore the benefits of moving some apps to public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Public cloud offers benefits such as hyper-scalability, easy business continuity, flexibility to grow – and shrink – without huge up-front capital investment. And increasingly important, the cloud offers technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and even quantum computing that private data centers just can’t offer.
Hybrid Cloud
What I see happening with many companies is that they are moving towards a hybrid cloud environment. Some applications make sense and save money by running in a private data center, while other applications and workloads make more sense to run in a public cloud. I even see some companies moving workloads OUT of the cloud and back to private or shared data centers to save money. They discovered that they can run workloads at data centers such as Tierpoint much cheaper and more securely than they can in the public cloud.
Managing Applications in the Cloud
Most larger companies now have expertise running applications on VMware’s vSphere hypervisor. They have the training and tools such as management consoles in place to monitor processing loads, security, and storage. Moving applications to native AWS or Azure environments requires not only rewriting apps for this new environment, but also testing the loads and performance and security of these apps. It is a huge commitment to migrate apps from VMware to a native cloud environment.
Luckily, VMware has made this easy by offering VMware for AWS Cloud, and a recent announcement with Microsoft to run VMware on bare-metal Azure hardware. Both of these cloud providers allow companies to run a standard VMware environment on bare-metal hardware inside the AWS or Azure cloud. Companies can use the tools they know to easily move workloads into and out of the cloud as needed, with no retraining and very little testing.
Access cloud-based Artificial Intelligence
Say you have a developer come to your infrastructure team and say they need access to the AI engine in the AWS cloud. Sure, you could build a tunnel from your data center to AWS and they could make calls to AWS AI through this tunnel, but the apps may then suffer latency delays and unpredictability because of circuit overload. Or you could suggest the team rewrite and test the app in a native AWS EC2 environment, which will take time and money.
Instead, with VMware Cloud for AWS, you could easily move the app to AWS so that the developers can make API calls to AWS AI over the ultra-fast AWS back-end infrastructure, thereby saving time, speeding applications and improving the end-user experience. Your team doesn’t need to learn the AWS environment. They simply use their existing tools to move the workload to AWS and provide access to the AWS AI engine.
Any app, any cloud, any device
With VMware’s strategy of any app, any cloud (public or private) an any device, it becomes easier, faster, and less risky to move apps to and from the public cloud and run them where it makes the most sense. Have a big Christmas season planned? Move workloads to AWS or Azure to handle the increased capacity, then scale back to your own data center after the holiday season ends. Need work-from-home Remote Desktop support on an ultra-large scale like with the COVID-19 pandemic? Easily scale your Remote Desktop workloads to the public cloud during the pandemic, then move those back internally when the pandemic has passed.
By architecting for a multi-cloud environment and using the same VMware tools you already know, organizations can have the best of both worlds – public cloud for scalability, elasticity, and responsiveness, private clouds to save money and offer more controlled security.
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