Next Chapter in Hybrid Cloud, Bringing Public Cloud Services to VMware SDDC
To-date conversations on hybrid clouds have been one-directional, centered around use of public cloud for disaster recovery, capacity expansion or geographic coverage. Conventional wisdom says you need to move workloads to public clouds to get the full benefits of cloud. Not anymore, we are announcing the technology preview of Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware. With this announcement we are bringing the extremely popular database management service, Amazon RDS, to our hundreds of thousands of VMware customers and VMware Cloud Provider Partner datacenters, including VMware Cloud on AWS.
Next chapter of Hybrid Cloud is about bringing public cloud capability to the VMware Data center, giving you maximum deployment flexibility and blurring the lines between public and private cloud.
Why is this important?
Enterprises have standardized on VMware for their infrastructure and application needs. For many years now, the database a key underpinning of any enterprise application has enjoyed the benefits of a robust virtualization platform from VMware. In fact, our conservative estimates indicate there are over 5M database workloads running atop VMware SDDC today. And this number is fast growing. These databases are powering mission critical workloads and applications and are being managed by database professionals. In certain cases, these databases can never leave the customer premises due to regulatory, compliance and data locality regulations. Now, imagine getting the same robust Amazon RDS capabilities that automate and simplify time-consuming administration tasks but now for your on-premise databases. This is huge!
So, what is RDS on VMware?
The VMware and AWS partnership (with VMC on AWS being one of the first offers) is fast blossoming into a two-way street, moving VMW capabilities to AWS and bringing native AWS services to VMware environments in customer data centers.
RDS on VMware radically eases database management by simplifying provisioning of new database instances on-premises in minutes as well as scaling storage, compute, and memory with just a few clicks. RDS on VMware automates database management in virtualized environments freeing up database administrators to focus on developing and tuning their databases and applications. Additionally, customers can now backup their databases on-premises and in AWS, run their databases on-premises in high availability configurations by replicating data across multiple vSphere clusters, and scale their databases reads by creating read-replicas on-premises and in the cloud. With patching of the OS and the database built in as a seamless service RDS truly provides full lifecycle capabilities for database management. This capability will support the following database flavors – PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, SQLServer and Oracle.
Amazon RDS will become available in coming months. Register now for early access to the preview.
What are the unique features of the RDS service on VMware?
Custom AWS Availability Zone (AZ) mapped to a vSphere cluster – As part of the installation and configuration of the Amazon RDS on VMware service at the edge, a custom AWS availability zone is defined and mapped to a vSphere cluster certified for RDS. From the Amazon RDS portal or using the RDS APIs, developers or DB Admins can deploy RDS database instances into such custom availability zones/vSphere cluster.
Disconnected mode operation – Applications at the edge need to be operational even with intermittent loss of internet connectivity to AWS cloud. Even though the customer doesn’t have access to AWS CloudWatch or RDS Console, they can get full visibility into the health and status of the application and infrastructure using vRealize Operations (a component of the solution). Databases remain fully operational and resilient during disconnected periods.
Data locality – The cloud services are deployed locally, and the data resides locally. Data doesn’t have to leave the premises if the customer chooses to do so, including for audits, backups & archival.
What this means and what’s next…
With this announcement we are giving our customers what they want, where they want. We are taking a key innovation from Amazon, RDS, and bringing it to the datacenter. This is just the beginning of what could be a very fruitful partnership and trend. Imagine a future state where we are able to deliver key innovations from across public clouds right at your doorstep – in the data center. The best of both worlds indeed. Stay tuned as we are just getting started here.
Learn more at VMworld
Coming to VMworld US? Get a deeper-dive into Amazon RDS on VMware in this session jointly presented by speakers from VMware and AWS.
