For companies that are invested in on-prem datacenters, moving to the public cloud is no trivia task. While many of our customers are eager to “get out of the datacenter” business and exploit the seamless consumption model and innovation of the large hyperscalers, embracing a new platform has a steep learning curve. Moreover, moving existing workloads to the public cloud is easier said than done. I have yet to find a customer who moved to the cloud quicker than expected.
That is why, within the past few years, VMware has been aggressively pursuing partnerships with the likes of AWS and GCP, delivering VMware Cloud solutions hosted in these public clouds – respectively VMware Cloud on AWS, and Google Cloud VMware Engine. That is, the standard VMware Cloud Foundation stack, with the same infrastructure components that are used to establish a private cloud (vSphere-NSX-VSAN) on-prem, but hosted and managed for you. By using the same underlying technologies on-prem and in your preferred public cloud and working with a familiar toolchain, the need for refactoring is minimized and workload migration becomes much simpler and faster.
However, public clouds are more than just about hosting. The real value of the hypervisor clouds resides on the intuitive consumption model and innovation at the platform and service layer. That is where vRealize Automation Cloud comes into play: It is the management solution that will establishes a consistent consumption and operating layer across your on-prem and hosted VMware clouds, as well as your native hyperscaler clouds.
vRealize Automation Cloud for Google Cloud VMware Engine
We are happy to announce that vRealize Automation Cloud has now been tested and certified to work with VMware’s hosted cloud solution on Google Cloud. This month, vRealize Automation Cloud brings a host of critical cloud capabilities around self-service consumption, DevOps for Infrastructure and wholistic, flexible governance for Google Cloud VMware Engine.
Cloud=Self-Service
Easy consumption is a key tenet of any cloud solution. vRealize Automation Cloud curates the VMware Cloud surface to define VMware-based services at the desired abstraction level (infrastructure, platform, software) and exposes it as a service catalog item in a fully customizable form. This way, defined services can be consumed through the storefront interface, APIs or even as part of an event-based workflow. Finally, Integration with ServiceNow ITSM enables another popular way to consume tailored services.
Business-Driven Governance
Policies have always been the strong suite for vRealize Automation Cloud. vRealize Automation Cloud can define policies in different stages of a workload lifecycle. Using tags, and our unique cloud agnostic placement engine, the vRealize Automation Cloud admin can define placement rules to optimize where a workload should land depending on factors such as network, cloud provider, environment type etc. At the placement stage, tagging and naming rules can also be defined to control the naming nomenclature and tag sprawl. Moreover, on the service catalog, policies can be defined to detail how much, by whom and for how long a catalog item can be consumed. Access, approval, lease, resource and cost policies can be employed at this level. Finally, vRealize Automation Cloud comes with two polyglot workflow engines (vRealize Orchestrator and Action Based Extensibility) to enable relationship definition between systems and processes imperatively.
DevOps for Infrastructure
vRealize Automation Cloud is designed to help the infrastructure administrator and developer to easily leverage best practices from the DevOps word. vRealize Automation Cloud API-first and Infrastructure-as-Code in a “low-code” model.
Meanwhile, we maintain the slick canvas for designing and configuring VMware Cloud Templates and a full GUI, for users that prefer graphical interfaces. Additionally, vRealize Automation Cloud comes with its own pipelining solution – VMware Code Stream. Unlike other CI/release automation solutions, Code Stream focuses on infrastructure use cases, such as image building, and quick time to value with features such as smart progressive delivery templates and out-of-the-box dashboards to monitor pipeline key performance indicators. Integrations with Git and some of the most common developer tools (e.g., Jenkins, Bamboo, Artifactory), make vRealize Automation Cloud the ideal solution to implement GitOps workflows and establish a high-trust environment where developers and operators can collaborate in equal terms, in a language they can both understand and work with.
Getting Started
If you already are a Google Cloud VMware Engine customer, connecting and starting using it with vRealize Automation Cloud is easy as pie. Once you connect your respective vCenter and NSX accounts you are ready to go. To make things better, we offer a free 45-day trial for vRealize Automation Cloud that you can use to explore our solution at your own leisure or with a little help from an automation expert near you.
