VMware on AWS goes live but Aussie rollout will have to wait

Australians are set to wait until at least next year before getting a local instance of VMware Cloud on AWS amid news the company has gone live in the US with its first availability zone – nearly a year after first announcing the strategic alliance.

VMware took the wraps off its first location, the AWS US West availability zone in Oregon, during this week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas. Details on pricing are expected later in the conference.

The VMware Cloud on AWS service will initially be available only on hourly billing – a signal that VMware has learned from Amazon's highly flexible approach. Annual and three-year licences will be available at some point down the track.

The announcement comes after a beta stage involving 50 customers and partners.

VMware is keeping mum on its timeline for further availability zones.

Mark Lohmeyer, VP of products, cloud platform business unit, claimed demand was "incredibly strong, including many Australian customers" and that VMware intends to host the service "in many AWS regions around the world and have worldwide coverage throughout 2018", but would stagger the rollout to guarantee service levels.

"Technically the regions are very consistent around the world so there is not a high technical bar to being able to to do that but we want to make sure we do it in a way that we can support customers coming onto this platform around the world," Lohmeyer added.

VMware Cloud on AWS brings together the vendor's three central technologies for software-defined data centre (SDDC) – vSphere hypervisor, VSAN for storage and NSX network virtualisation – and runs them on a single type of elastic bare metal server in AWS public cloud that was jointly developed to run the VMware on AWS stack.

The AWS partnership is widely perceived as a response to the growth of Microsoft Azure, which has been pursuing market leader AWS and recently launched the Azure Stack platform to offer customers a 'best of both worlds' between public and private cloud.

Customers running VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to use the same skills, tools and processes to manage private and public cloud environments; and the technology also promises "seamless, fast, and bi-directional workload portability between private and public clouds".

VMware claims users will be able to spin up an entire VMware SDDC stack in under a couple hours. The fact it is sitting side-by-side with AWS infrastructure means very low latency.

"VMware Cloud on AWS is ideal for customers looking to migrate applications to the public cloud, develop entirely new applications, extend the capacity of their data centres for existing applications, or quickly provision development and test environments," according to a VMware statement.

Joe Coyle, executive vice president and global CTO of cloud services at Capgemini, said: "The enterprise’s software-defined data centres and the AWS cloud ecosystem of technologies and products now have a defined future together. Our customers increasingly want portability for their workloads across private and public cloud environments, while using industry-leading platforms."

VMware also used the conference to launch six new cloud services: Discovery for analysing cloud utilisation; Cost Insight for accounting and cost optimisation across multiple clouds; NSX Cloud to create secure networks using micro-segmentation; Network Insight for compliance across cloud; Wavefront for monitoring and analytics; and AppDefence for governance and security. 

The journalist travelled to VMworld as a guest of VMware.