VMware Aria Automation is a powerful tool for simplifying the cloud experience with a modern automation platform. Along with being a modern platform, it manages public cloud resources and automates processes.
VMware Aria Automation is designed to support public cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and VMware Cloud on AWS.
However, some of the challenges today in using VMware Aria Automation for public clouds are:
- There are lot of services offered in public clouds, but VMware Aria Automation supported just a few cloud resources in AWS, Azure and GCP.
- Advanced public cloud use cases cannot be supported in VMware Aria Automation.
- New resources are being added to public clouds at faster pace.
- New properties and operations are added to existing resources in public clouds.
Plugin based framework
We are introducing a new plugin framework for both SaaS and on-premise deployments to overcome these challenges.
The new plugin framework provides the following features:
- Faster availability and support of all public cloud resources
- Plugins built outside of VMware Aria Automation will enable support for broader cloud resources.
- VMware will provide plugins for AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- In the future, customers can build custom plugins and integrate with Aria Automation.
- Provide support for new public cloud resources without the need to upgrade Aria Automation (Out-of-band support)
- Since this is a plugin framework, the Aria Automation platform need not be upgraded to support new cloud resources. An update to the plugin will be sufficient.
- It will support existing Aria Automation policies
- All existing Aria Automation policies, like Approvals, Provisioning, and Placements policies, will be supported.
- Visual Canvas for management of any cloud resource
- The new cloud resources can be used alongside classic resources to create VMware Aria Automation Templates. Also, the framework supports integration with the Allocation and Advanced Placement policies.
- Additional information on allocation and placement can be found in the Introducing Allocation Helpers in VMware Aria Automation blog.
- The ability to onboard plugins from other VMware products without providers such as NSX-T
- This framework enables faster integration with other VMware products.
Conclusion
As organizations embrace different kinds of public cloud resources, managing the life cycle of these resources can quickly become tedious. VMware Aria Automation provides a multi-cloud management solution that simplifies and streamlines the management of cloud resources with centralized control, automation, cost management, security and compliance, for a wide range of cloud platforms. VMware Aria can help organizations achieve greater agility, flexibility, and efficiency in their cloud operations.
