2019 was a milestone year for CloudHealth. It was our first full year as part of the VMware family, our second year hosting our CloudLIVE (formerly CloudHealth Connect) conference, a year with over 100 product updates to the CloudHealth platform, and the year we expanded the CloudHealth portfolio to include VMware Secure State. Not to mention the fact that we also saw an increase in the number of users and partners who became certified CloudHealth administrators.
Let’s breakdown the most notable releases across the three core areas of the cloud maturity framework:
Cloud Financial Management
Cloud Financial Management is the process of aligning cloud investments to strategic business initiatives, while driving financial accountability and ownership throughout an organization. This year we released functionality to enhance cost visibility, improve historical reporting, support hybrid cloud environments, and manage new AWS discounts.
Multicloud Cost Report (Beta)
We released a single report that allows you to view your cost across service items like compute, storage, and networking—but more importantly it allows you to use CloudHealth Perspectives to uniquely showback exactly how your business is making use of your infrastructure collectively in AWS, Azure, GCP, and your own data centers.
Data Archive
A new opt-in feature, Data Archive, allows you to begin to accrue snapshots of your data on a monthly basis, across your AWS, Azure, GCP, and Data Center environments. This data will be used to create longer historical time horizons to help you with common procedures like quarter-over-quarter analysis or year-over-year trends.
Azure Tier 2 Billing
With this release, we are providing Tier 2 Resellers with the same features and functionality as we are for our current CSP Direct Partners. Tier 2 Resellers now have the ability to provide visibility, cost optimization, and governance to their customers.
CloudHealth Hybrid
CloudHealth Hybrid brings together the functionality of CloudHealth Data Center and VMware vRealize Business for Cloud (vRBC) into a single standalone SaaS offering, with new features including new cost benchmarks and cost drivers, data center rightsizing, and early access to VMware Cloud on AWS support.
AWS Savings Plans
We were proud to announce support for AWS Savings Plans closely aligned to AWS’ launch. CloudHealth provides visibility and reporting for Savings Plans within the Cost History Report, EC2 Instance Cost and Usage Reports, and the new Savings Plans Asset Report. Additionally, we support the reallocation of AWS Savings Plan discounts in the Partner Generated Billing engine.
Cloud Operations
Cloud Operations is the process of managing and delivering cloud services that meet the availability, performance, recoverability, and scalability needs of the business. This year we released functionality that covers the full scope of cloud operations from onboarding and APIs to rightsizing, container reporting, and automation.
Updates to Azure Health Check Pulse Report
This year we added new sections to the Azure Health Check, bringing it to parity with our AWS Health Check Report. New sections included Immediate Monthly Savings (e.g. Unattached Managed Disks, Unused Virtual Network Gateways, etc.) and Security Risk Exposure to help you quickly identify your highest areas of risk identified via the CIS Azure Foundations Policy.
Convertible RI Exchanger Automation
In 2018, we released the Convertible Reserved Instance Exchanger to help you recoup savings from underutilized convertible RIs in your AWS infrastructure while limiting additional investment. In 2019, we announced the general availability of automation for exchanging Convertible RIs.
Azure API Updates
Automation is key when setting up accounts in CloudHealth, which is why our Azure partners, channel customers, and direct customers can now set up their account Service Principals via the CloudHealth API. Additionally, with the CloudHealth Azure Partner Customer Creation and Assignment APIs, partners can now create, modify, and get a list of customer tenant(s) within CloudHealth.
Kubernetes Overview Report (Beta)
The Kubernetes Overview Report brings several key reports into a centralized dashboard enabling you to understand cost and usage trends in aggregate and per cluster and namespace. This is available in the CloudHealth AWS, Azure, and GCP modules.
Google Compute Engine (GCE) Rightsizing
The GCE Rightsizing Report displays recommendations to increase or decrease the size of GCE instances based off of CPU or RAM utilization. In addition to viewing your recommendation based off of the projected cost, you can also use a field titled ‘Recommendation Age’ to ensure that recommendations have been valid for at least one full usage cycle.
Cloud Security & Compliance
Cloud Security & Compliance is the process of proactively detecting and remediating vulnerabilities in your cloud environment. Over the past year we’ve made strategic and technical investments in the security and compliance space to provide customers with the full scope of cloud management capabilities.
CIS Azure Foundations Security Policy
Earlier this year, we announced the general availability of the CIS Azure Foundations Security Policy and Violation Report. This product release provides proactive security alerts ranked by severity, along with best practices documentation for remediating security issues.
VMware Secure State (VSS)
In June, we announced the availability of VMware Secure State, an intelligent cloud security solution that helps you minimize security risks and proactively mitigate threats across AWS and Azure. The solution builds an interconnected cloud services model (ICSM) of your infrastructure, enabling you to explore and understand the relationships between cloud objects. As part of the CloudHealth portfolio, VSS helps Cloud Security and Operations teams get a deeper level of visibility and investigation context for security threats.
Continuous Training and Enablement
Our commitment to customer and partner success knows no bounds. With the ever-changing nature of the cloud, we strongly encourage users to continue expanding their cloud knowledge through training and certification. This year, our Training Team announced new role-based learning paths to help users fully engage with the platform. These learning paths contain a series of virtual courses led by our talented training instructors and include many hands-on activities. Once your training is complete, you can test and validate your knowledge of the platform with our Platform Administrator Certification. It’s quite fun to gamify this among your teams and see who knows the ins and outs of the platform.
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