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VMware Cloud on AWS: Get your basics right: Part 5: Modernize applications and infrastructure

In the fifth part of our blog, we take you through the three key ways VMware Cloud on AWS helps you modernize infrastructure and applications.

 

We’re back with the fifth part of the Get your basics right series about VMware Cloud on AWS. In the first four parts, we provided an overview of VMware Cloud on AWS and covered three use cases: cloud migration, data center extension and disaster recovery. In this part, we discuss the fourth use case: application modernization. 

Modern applications are transforming businesses to deliver improved digital experiences to win, serve and retain customers. These modern applications need to drive business outcomes such as increased business agility, innovation, growth and market differentiation while balancing costs, security, reliability and control. However, when customers consider modernization of their existing on-premises applications, they face some challenges that increase the cost, risk and time of the modernization project. 

 

Some of the key challenges are:

  • Shortage of necessary skillsets to modernize the applications
  • Disruptions to existing business processes and operations due to potential application downtime during modernization
  • Inflexibility in application and infrastructure architecture that makes it challenging to leverage modern tooling and services
  • Wastage of current IT investments while modernizing applications due to lack of application portability across environments
  • Multiple operating models, processes and lack of easy self-service automation to manage complex and diverse environments consistently
  • Inability to easily and seamlessly leverage CI/CD methodologies, application catalogs and native cloud services to enrich enterprise applications due to a fragmented technology ecosystem

 

VMware Cloud on AWS helps customers alleviate these challenges and accelerate their modernization journey. It provides an infrastructure platform option for customers to modernize their existing enterprise applications on and enables them to run their enterprise workloads of today and tomorrow. Customers can rapidly migrate their applications to the cloud without downtime. And once in the cloud, they can start their modernization journey with minimal disruption to their business. They can start transforming their applications by leveraging modern frameworks such as Kubernetes, enriching them with native cloud services and automating the underlying infrastructure operations with DevOps tooling.

 

Now, let’s take a closer look.

VMware Cloud on AWS can help customers modernize their applications and infrastructure operations in 3 ways:
1. Automation of IT infrastructure operations: 

VMware Cloud on AWS is an extensible platform that provides a number of ways to integrate, extend and automate IT infrastructure operations across VMware products and services. It provides a seamless developer experience across the entire platform with a developer center, developer tools and automation tools. Some of the key capabilities it provides to automate IT operations are:

  • Developer center: It provides access to all content related to automation and integration. VMware Cloud on AWS also supports a contextual, logged-in experience for developers in the VMware Cloud on AWS Console.
    • Public developer center: Accessible by everyone and has all public content related to automation and integration. The key features include API explorer, samples and community forums.
    • In-product developer center: Requires access to VMware Cloud on AWS and provides a rich, contextual experience based on user profile.
  • Developer tools: VMware Cloud on AWS provides a wide range of developer tools (SDKs, REST APIs and Code Samples) that enable users to use their preferred programming language and leverage the samples for automation instead of writing the code from scratch. Learn more
  • Automation tools: VMware Cloud on AWS provides high level cmdlets for PowerCLI, DCLI and infrastructure as code (IaC) for the key infrastructure management workflows. With IaC, customers can fully automate the provisioning and maintenance of the infrastructure. Currently, on VMware Cloud on AWS, we support 3 different IaC options: vRealize Automation Cloud IaC provider, Hashicorp Terraform Provider and AWS CloudFormation templates
  • Consistent operations management: VMware Cloud on AWS provides consistent operations across the cloud infrastructure with familiar and proven technologies such as VMware vCenter Server for day-to-day operations and VMware vRealize set of technologies for advanced operations. 
    • vCenter Server: vCenter server delivers centralized visibility and management at scale for vSphere-based environments for day-to-day tasks, giving IT administrators simple and automated control over their virtual environment to deliver infrastructure with confidence. 
    • vRealize Operations Cloud: vRealize Operations Cloud can optimize and manage VMware Cloud on AWS and vSphere-based private cloud infrastructure, supporting both traditional and next gen container workloads. Out of box and customizable dashboards, reports, views and alerts help provide visibility and control over both VM and container infrastructure. Integration with vRealize Operations Cloud provides full 360-degree troubleshooting.
    • vRealize Log Insight Cloud: vRealize Log Insight Cloud can centralize log management, accelerate IT troubleshooting and provide deep operational visibility across VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere-based private cloud environments, AWS and both traditional and container-based applications. 

 

To learn more about how to automate your IT infrastructure operations using VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some resources for you: 

 

2. Transformation of application infrastructure:

  • Support for Kubernetes and containers on VMware Cloud on AWS:
    • With support of VMware Tanzu™ Kubernetes Grid™ Plus support for VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can now scale, manage and deploy Kubernetes clusters in the cloud as per their needs. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes distribution that packages open source technologies and automation tooling to help get customers up and running quickly with a scalable, multi-cluster Kubernetes environment. Customers deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus on VMware Cloud on AWS can benefit from 24×7 break-fix support for Kubernetes and key open source ecosystem technologies. Learn more
  • Support for a wide range of VMware and 3rd party ISV ecosystem solutions: Customers can leverage the VMware Cloud Marketplace for a vast ecosystem of Partner Ready VMware Cloud solutions for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), configuration management and source control. All these solutions are already validated on VMware Cloud on AWS, which means that customers can use the same solutions that they were using on-premises on VMware Cloud on AWS. 

 

To learn more about how to transform your application infrastructure using VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some resources for you:

 

3. Enrich your applications and infrastructure with cloud services:

VMware Cloud on AWS provides high-bandwidth, low latency connectivity to a broad range of AWS services. With that, customers can extend the value of their enterprise applications running in VMware Cloud on AWS by integrating those with 170+ native AWS services across different categories such as storage, database and analytics, serverless, compute, networking, security, IoT, machine learning and more. Learn more

To learn more about how to enrich your applications using native AWS services, here are some resources for you:

 

To learn more about application modernization with VMware Cloud on AWS, check out the solution brief.

If you would like to learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some more learning resources for you and you can get started now with VMware Cloud on AWS by purchasing the service via web here.

Resources:

 

Sonali Desai

Sonali Desai is a Product Marketing Engineer for VMware Cloud Foundation at VMware by Broadcom, Inc. Sonali has been working in IT industry for more than 15 years with experience…

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