With all the announcements and innovations around VMware Explore US last week, we took a short break from the Managed Services Monday series.
This week, we are ready to bring all the pieces discussed in this blog series together and wrap it up into a big picture!
VMware Explore 2023 Announcements
There were many Aria announcements and innovations at VMware Explore 2023, that allow providers to deliver even more sophisticated managed services for their multi-cloud customers. The ones that are relevant in the context of this blog series, are the following:
- VMware Aria Hub is now named Tanzu Hub and serves as a centralized multi-cloud management platform that aims to simplify visibility, governance, and collaboration. At VMware Explore Las Vegas, we were extremely excited to announce the tech preview of new generative-AI assisted capabilities that can reduce the complexity associated with managing multi-cloud environments.
- VMware Tanzu Hub with Intelligent Assist is a large language model capability that enables customers and partner to complete management tasks in less time with reduced friction that is often associated with these tasks.
- With VMware Tanzu Intelligence Services, we introduced a new Tanzu product family designed to supercharge the (managed) Day 2 operations for platform engineering and ops teams. Tanzu Intelligence Services includes portions of the VMware Aria portfolio, delivering a platform for federated data to empower platform engineering and (managed) cloud operations.
- Tanzu Intelligence Services helps teams proactively optimize the cost, performance, and security of applications across clouds and includes VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (formerly VMware Aria Cost by CloudHealth), VMware Tanzu Guardrails (formerly VMware Aria Automation Guardrails), VMware Tanzu Insights (formerly VMware Aria Business Insights), and VMware Tanzu Transformer (formerly announced as VMware Aria Migration).
Additional Value-Added Services
Let’s not get lost in new names too much and focus on what matters: Delivering value to multi-cloud consumers. Especially the additional solutions contained in Tanzu Hub and Intelligence Services offer an additional opportunities here.
Business Insights Services
Tanzu Insights, formerly Aria Business Insights, delivers explainable AI/ML based insights for deeper and contextual troubleshooting of the multi-cloud environment. It covers for Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure environments and enables visibility, observability and correlation in combination with VMware Aria Operations for Applications. The solution provides a unified platform enabling customers and providers to leverage visibility and AI/ML based insights holistically. The proactive insights automatically guide the troubleshooting flow, streamlining the incident resolution journey. The intelligent grouping of alerts by source brings a cohesive approach to managing multiple alerts more effectively. A key advantage of VMware Tanzu Insights is the ability to present events in real-time sequence, eliminating the need for juggling multiple isolated tools.
Figure 1: Aria Business Insights UI
Assessment and Migration Services
VMware Tanzu Transformer, formerly Aria Migration, aims to be a one stop shop multi-cloud migration service. It helps simplify and accelerate one of the most difficult tasks many organizations face in their multi-cloud journey. It identifies and migrates workloads and applications to the optimal cloud, based on the goals for security, performance, cost, and time.
A migration assessment begins with adding data sources and then scoping the migration to determine what resources might need migration from one infrastructure node or platform to another. Data sources can be discovered resources, configured cloud accounts or imports from a saved RVTools CSV file to use as the inventory for the assessment. Tanzu Transformer can then perform an assessment based on various criteria, such as network connections, application dependencies or cluster-based. Aria Operations for Networks can provide the required information for these migration plans. Afterwards, migration waves of workloads can automatically execute at scale using VMware HCX.
Figure 2: Aria Migration UI
Learn more about the value of Tanzu Transformer, formerly Aria Migration, here.
End-to-End and Integration Services
VMware Tanzu Hub, formerly Aria Hub, is the platform that unifies data across the VMware Cloud Management services. By unifying the data, Tanzu Hub provides visibility into the resources running
on the multi-cloud infrastructure, including the applications. As an application-centric service, VMware Tanzu Hub automates the application discovery process and then gives customers and partner the tools to refine the applications and monitor their status. It provides a single user interface that integrates the existing management solutions to focus on resource management.
In the context of Tanzu Hub, the Entity Data Service (EDS) stores collected data about resources in the VMware Aria Graph database and reconciles the entity IDs for entities collected. As inventory data is collected from the integrated VMware Aria services, the entities in EDS get a unique and canonical resource ID. This ID allows EDS and its collectors to normalize the different data models from the different providers, such as native public clouds and VMware Aria services, to merge the separate namespaces into a common entity in EDS. The merging ensures that when working with resources or applications in VMware Tanzu Hub, operators are seeing the relevant resource consumption, applications, findings, and business insights provided by the integrated services.
Figure 3: Hub and Graph (Project Ensemble) architecture
The GraphQL interface enables simple yet very powerful integrations. Providers can leverage this to integrate into the Aria solutions and scale their managed services business. Graph is expressly designed for the operational challenges of cloud-native applications and environments. And it provides access to a single source-of-truth with updates in near-real time.
The Big Picture
Finally, let’s recap what we covered in this blog series. Afterwards, we put it all into a big picture on which managed services can be offered with Aria.
Managed Multi-Cloud Resources
A large portion of managed services providers will want to start their journey from where they are. For many, this is managed infrastructure services today. Using Aria Operations allows this business to expand to any cloud. And they can move deeper into to cloud infrastructure, starting from the OS, and expanding to native IaaS and PaaS:
Figure 4: Managed Infrastructure with Aria Operations
With infrastructure resources deployable and managable across clouds, networking complexities need to be addressed. By adding Aria Operations for Networks, partners can deliver a range of managed services in this space. These range from device operations to traffic and native network service management:
Figure 5: Managed Networking with Aria Operations for Networks
Moving up the stack, service providers can also help enforce guardrails around cloud resources. By using Aria Automation and Guardrails (now Tanzu Guardrails), they can offer managed multi-cloud landing zones to their customers across any form factor. This includes policies, service catalogs as well as automated deployment and configuration management:
Figure 6: Managed Landing Zones with Aria Automation and Guardrails
Application and Security
Once the multi-cloud infrastructure is consumable in a governed way, the focus can move to the applications. Through Aria Operations for Applications and the Aria Operations Suite, partners can offer a range of application services. These range from providing full stack visibility to application management and platform as a service offerings:
Figure 7: Managed Applications with Aria Operations
To handle security across all apps and clouds, providers can bring Aria Automation for Secure Hosts and Secure Clouds into the picture. These work in close collaboration with the other tools we already covered, for example Aria Operations and Guardrails. Managed security services can range from Cloud Security Posture Management, workload and configuration security as well as of course network security:
Figure 8: Managed Security with Aria Automation for Secure Hosts and Clouds
FinOps and Business Value
Cloud Financial Management and FinOps services for multi-cloud customers leverage Aria Cost, now called Tanzu CloudHealth. In combination with Aria Operations, this allows to implement chargeback, offer cost optimization services and enforce governance across the environment as a service:
Figure 9: FinOps with Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth
To act on findings from FinOps and improve business value, providers need to deliver a holistic view of the environment. This is enabled through (formerly Aria) Tanzu Hub and it’s intelligence services, for example Tanzu Transformer (formerly Aria Migration) and more. Providers can use these service for assessment and advisory services, workload migration and transformation:
Figure 10: Additional Service with Aria and Tanzu Intelligence Services
And here is what it all looks like in the big picture, on a high-level:
Figure 11: Big Picture managed services Opportunity
Bringing it all together
Building such a diverse managed services portfolio with the various tools we covered does of course require a lot of integration and customisation. We covered many of the integration points within the Aria portfolio during this blog series already. And of course the Aria and Tanzu portfolio needed does not live in isolation either. For service providers, there are a couple of typical integrations with other products in their environment. These are, amongst others:
- VMware Cloud Director is a leading cloud service-delivery platform used by cloud providers to operate & manage successful cloud-service businesses.
- VMware Cloud Partner Navigator is the unified SaaS partner platform which enables cloud provider partners to deliver multi-cloud services. We have covered this for multiple Aria SaaS solutions.
- vCloud Usage Meter is a virtual appliance that meters and collects data for products in the Partner Connect Program. This includes many of the Aria product we covered here.
- Tanzu Mission Control provides a centralized Kubernetes management platform. This gives Cloud Services Providers and their users the independence they need to consume and manage Kubernetes resources across clouds.
- VMware NSX is the security and networking service of the VMware services portfolio. It enables secure networking for the customer multi-cloud environment.
- VMware SD-WAN is a cloud and edge infrastructure services portfolio. It enables high-performance branch and device connections to the multi-cloud environment.
- And many more…
Many of these solutions are imperative for metering, billing and service delivery capabilities. Yet different parts of the stack come with different capabilities. And some may require extensive customisation, depending on the provider processes and requirements . And depending on the customer, partners may need to consider the availability of offerings for hosting and/or as SaaS solutions. As a first start for these considerations, the following picture outlines a few aspects. Please be aware, that this is not a complete picture:
Figure 12: Key integration with other service provider solutions and services
Conclusion
This concludes the ten-part Managed Services Monday with VMware Aria blog series. We have seen how internal and external service providers can build a complete and compelling set of managed services. These value-added services are capable of enabling and accelerating a successful multi-cloud journey for customers. At the same time, it allows service providers to stay relevant in times of increased competition. Moving from IaaS services to value-added managed services, can also allow providers to increase margin, wallet-share and relevance with their customers.
We hope you enjoyed this series of blogs on building managed services with Aria. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to your account team if you want to learn more.
