As shared in my previous vRealize Automation & VMware Solution Self-Service Hybrid Cloud Hyperscalers blog, we learned that vRealize Automation Cloud and vRealize Automation 8.4 (v3 as well) are now tested and certified to work with VMware’s hosted cloud solutions, among them VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS).
I also mentioned that this capability delivers a good deal of value and opens up new exciting use cases, such as, future datacenter expansion from private clouds to multiple public clouds, disaster recovery, business continuity, modern application development and integration to Public Cloud Native Services, and it is precisely this last feature, integration to Public Cloud Native Services, I would like to expand further.
Normally, you migrate your existing applications to one of the VMware Clouds providers, as an example, let’s say it is a Tier-3 application (Front-End Server & Back-End Server, based on MySQL 5.7) and it was migrated to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS).
Then you could create a new Cloud Template defining the same kind of Tier-3 application, just like the one you migrated before.
This will make it easier to consume and provision new instantiations of the same Tier-3 application workload for all your entitled customers at VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS).
Now, let’s assume that your Tier-3 application is an overnight success, your incoming traffic explodes and you need to scale your solution, also let’s imagine that your DevOps engineers are masters on every single thing related to the application running inside the Front-End Server, but when it comes to the Back-End, the Database Management, well let’s pretend for a minute, that it could be a challenge for them (I know you got this too but humor me for a little while for the sake of the blog).
Suddenly, you realized that Amazon provides the RDS for MySQL cloud service, that frees you up to focus on your application development by managing time-consuming database administration tasks including backups, software patching, monitoring, scaling and replication.
And better yet, that you could use exactly the same vRealize Automation capabilities for accessing that public native RDS for MySQL cloud service by simply exchanging the old resources that provided the Database Service (VMs running MySQL Installation) for the RDS for MySQL ones, as you could see in the following Cloud Template.
I simply defined two new resources: AWS.RDS.Cluster & AWS.RDS.Cluster.Instance in my existing IaC Code.
The first one, allows me to define the properties at the RDS for MySQL Cluster Level, properties that will be shared with all the Cluster Instances, e.g. cluster identifier prefixes, credentials, security, etc.
The second one describes the properties for the RDS for MySQL Cluster Instances, e.g. the instance class, the number of nodes, the engine and its version (in this case I am using MySQL 5.7, which it is compatible with my Front-End application).
I must emphasize, these are only a small subset of all the available properties for those resources.
Then, I simply versioned this new Cloud Template and exposed it to the vRealize Automation‘s Service Broker Catalog
Again, easy consumption (and governance), just like the previous Cloud Template.
Conclusion:
vRealize Automation Cloud and vRealize Automation 8.4 allows you to access native public cloud services simplifying and enhancing your journey to Hybrid Cloud.
Related Links:
vRealize Automation & VMware Solution Self-Service Hybrid Cloud Hyperscalers
Low-Cost Migrations to VMWare Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
