This blog was coauthored by Ramya Sarangarajan
With VMware Cloud Marketplace, you can discover, test and deploy validated third-party solutions in your multi-cloud environments. As of today, you can extend these solutions to vSphere and on-premises environments too. Choose from a wide range of validated software – including a catalog of Bitnami-packaged solutions – that can operate from the cloud to your data center.
At VMworld 2019 U.S. this year, we launched VMware Cloud Marketplace, a service that enables our customers to discover, try and deploy a breadth of validated open-source and third-party solutions in their multi-cloud environments. The Cloud Marketplace was initially available on three VMware compute platforms – VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Enterprise PKS and VMware vCloud Director. Today, we are proud to announce that we have extended its availability to native VMware vSphere, as well as to on-prem environments. We are also excited to launch the Bitnami® Community Catalog by VMware a catalog of Bitnami-packaged open-source solutions for our VMware Cloud Provider partners via VMware Cloud Provider Hub.
Expanding our portfolio of deployment targets
Over the last few weeks since our launch, customers have adopted the marketplace and are actively trying, downloading and deployment software from it – a testament to the value that the service provides. Also, we continue to enhance the platform with advanced capabilities and features to further benefit our publishing partners and customers.
At launch the catalog included more than 300 solutions deployable on VMware Cloud environments including VMware Cloud on AWS and vCloud Director. We enabled this availability by calling management APIs in these target environments and “pushing” the content to target locations – whether it’s Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) for VMware Cloud on AWS or Virtual Data Centers for vCloud Director. While this capability served many customers well, some of our early users have requested a “pull” mechanism of content delivery, primarily because perimeter firewalls did not allow incoming connections to their management plane.
Today, we are excited to announce the availability of a “pull” content delivery mechanism in VMware Cloud Marketplace. Through this mechanism, customers can subscribe to a solution in the cloud, add the link to the subscribed library in their data center, and then deploy the solution. This means that customers of all VMware platforms – including vSphere on-premises, VMware Cloud Foundation, and even VMware Cloud on AWS / vCloud Director customers behind a VPN – can now subscribe to our extensive catalog of third-party software from their data center, with just a simple click. What’s more, one-time setup takes just a few minutes!
“Kemba plans to use the new VMware Cloud Marketplace to quickly add new cloud-ready solutions in a turnkey fashion to any of our VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs. VMware Cloud Marketplace makes it a snap to select and install these solutions via the subscription option, all with a click of a mouse and a couple of keyboard strokes. We can quickly do proof of concept of a product in no time. We hope to see more mainstream solutions added in the future to this service as we have adopted a cloud-first strategy.”
- Ryon Brubaker, VP of IT, Kemba Credit Union
Feature Spotlight: Notifications
When customers subscribe to a solution on Cloud Marketplace, they are automatically signed up to receive notifications pertaining to that solution (delivered through a messaging bus). Any updates to the subscribed solution – new versions, security updates and so on – will automatically trigger a customer-configurable message through multiple channels of their choice. These channels include email at a programmed email address, Slack channel, and even direct “post” to a chosen webhook, which enables seamless integration with their IT service management software as needed. Thus, the notifications feature of VMware Cloud Marketplace greatly reduces the operational overhead involved in keeping all third-party solutions updated to the latest versions from a single service console.
Our own IT team at VMware deploys thousands of containers and VMs, including over 100 third-party solutions. By using Cloud Marketplace, our application operations team has significantly streamlined their operational practices.
“In IT Application Operations, we deal with various software which are consumed or used to build Business Applications, including Databases, Middleware, ETL, ERP, IDM, Portals, and BI. There has been an increase in the utilization of open-source software over the last few years. We deploy nearly 2500+ VM’s and 1000+ docker images every year for stateful applications across Private and Public cloud. Cloud Marketplace provides us quick and easy access to verified and security-hardened software images published by Bitnami and other vendors, that we can subscribe to and deploy across our Hybrid clouds using the click of a button. This drastically reduces the time to deploy pre-packaged software and increases developer productivity. Also, the private repository feature in Cloud Marketplace is extremely useful for centrally maintaining our own customized software images, which are used for custom application refreshes in Private Cloud.”
- Mukund Yadav, Director – IT AppOps, VMware
Introducing Bitnami Community Catalog for our Cloud Provider Partners
At VMworld US, we showcased a technology preview of vCloud Director with Bitnami Community—home to one of the largest catalogs of click-to-deploy applications and development stacks. We are now launching the Bitnami Community Catalog by VMware via VMware Cloud Marketplace for our cloud provider partners. Bitnami Community Catalog is a catalog of continuously maintained and optimized deploy-ready workload solutions, such as developer tools, databases, and network and security solutions. These pre-packaged solutions form the building blocks of a new application and can shorten the “builder’s journey” – an end-to-end process that tracks an application’s lifecycle from initial requirements to going live.
With this service, our cloud provider partners will be able to seamlessly provision open-source solutions for their tenants’ developers and DevOps communities. Our partners can provision and manage applications from the marketplace catalog by accessing VMware Cloud Provider Hub – just as they would for other VMware Cloud Services. With Bitnami Community Catalog, cloud providers can now attract developer workloads into their clouds and manage them with vCloud Director.
Next steps
You can view and log-in to the VMware Cloud Marketplace catalog through the cloud services portal at https://marketplace.cloud.vmware.com. If you would like to publish your solution(s) on VMware Cloud Marketplace, please reach out to [email protected] to get started. We look forward to working with you!
Read more about VMware Cloud Marketplace in our blogs:
- Announcing VMware Cloud Marketplace Initial Availability
- VMware Cloud Marketplace™ Beta Now Includes Bitnami Catalog of 130+ Open-Source Solutions
- Leverage Your Cloud Investments with VMware Cloud Marketplace
- Announcing VMware Cloud Marketplace Beta
For participants of VMworld 2019 Europe: We hope to see you at one of the many events where VMware Cloud Marketplace & Bitnami will be featured! Please click here for full details.
