Cloud Automation Services

Introducing the VMware Cloud Automation Services

During VMworld 2018 in the US VMware launched the Cloud Automation Services. A couple of weeks ago this finally became available to everybody. These are the new automation services that are launched “as-a-service” and can be consumed through VMware Cloud Services offerings.

This is a major shift towards a Cloud Management platform that customers can consume “as-a-service”. Opposite to the vRealize product line where people still need to install, manage and update themselves. These services will now provide a set of automation services that are app-centric and multi-cloud. All of which is managed and maintained by VMware.

Answering the needs of our customers

This fits into the strategy where most companies are heading. Over the last couple of years there has been a shift within Enterprise IT, where most companies not only want to consume infrastructure resources from their own datacenter, but also want to consume services that are provides “as-a-service”.

The best examples of-course being the public clouds from AWS, Azure, and Google. But there is also a need where companies want to consume other services such as service providers, telcos and edge computing. All of which need to be connected and where services need to be orchestrated across the board.

Next to that there is a shift to become more focus on that what the business actually consumes : the application. In the age of digital transformation IT departments need to deliver those applications that needs to make a difference.

Key to that is the developers and application operators. They are the ones that need to do a good job in order to deliver the applications to the business. Next to multi-cloud consumption, they want to be able to consume the infrastructure resources in a programmatic way and want to be able to run any type of applications framework. This means that the platform and needs to support virtual machines, containers or any other type of application frameworks to support the needs of the developer.

In other words, the IT infrastructure department needs to provide a platform that is multi-cloud and app-centric to be able to address the needs the developers and the application operations have. And ultimately the “Lines of Business”; the consumers of IT.

The Three Cloud Automation Services

And this is where the three new Cloud Automation Services come into play. VMware already delivered cloud services that help provide insight on what is happening in the different clouds.

Now with the Cloud Automation Services IT departments have the ability to automate and orchestrate services across clouds and to streamline the delivery of applications and infrastructure services to the consumers.

To make this possible VMware has create three separate Cloud Automation Services. All three can be used individually, but of course have been architected to work as a combined set of tools to accommodate the DevOps way of working.

Cloud Assembly

Orchestrates and expedites infrastructure and application delivery in line with DevOps principles. Cloud Assembly supports the provision to AWS, Azure and vSphere. And as it supports vSphere, it also can deploy to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Cloud Assembly provides project teams with the ability to collaborate on infrastructure and application blueprints. They can easily collaborate through the Web interface, command line and API. All of which can be versioned and works in an iterative fashion. This means changes to a blueprint can be pushed towards already deployed blueprint onto the infrastructure.

Developers can easily consume the resources using declarative “infrastructure-as-code” or an API to quickly deliver code and applications.

Service Broker

Service Broker is the “one-stop-shop” service portal where services can be published to authorised consumers. It aggregates the service blueprints that have been created in Cloud Assembly alongside the native content from multiple clouds and application platforms.

It is accessible to the consumer through a self-service graphical UI and API. It gives IT Operations the tool to define pre-defined environments to end-users running on VMware-base private or hybrid cloud or native AWS and Azure public clouds.

The Service Broker catalog can host services defined as VMware Cloud Assembly Blueprints and AWS Cloud Formation templates with additional services coming soon. Service Broker can govern resource access and use with different policy types down to the project level across supported clouds.

Code Stream

Code Stream provided a Continuous Deployment (CD) tool for modelling release pipelines to get new applications and features into production faster.

Digital tranformation drives up the demand for these new features and applications. Code Stream helps in rapid pipeline modelling to enable developers and DevOps teams to deliver the software faster and more frequent to production.

An advanced analytics dashboard makes high level status of all deployments visible and enables in-depth troubleshooting and trend analysis of code release models to reduce the time to deploy code.

Code Stream provides many integration with various Continuous Integration (CI) tooling to create in the end a seamless CI/CD flow that will enable developers to deliver high-quality software from idea to production in a fast and agile way.

Moving towards a Cloud Management Platform “as-a-service”

The reason VMware launched the Cloud Automation Services is the fact that a lot of customers want to have a Cloud Management Platform delivered “as-a-service”. The last couple of years we have seen customer wanting to consume resources from public cloud such as AWS, Amazon and Google.

To follow this trend VMware is now providing its customers with a full automation suite to manage both private and public cloud resources. This is an addition to the Cloud Services that were announced over the last year. Services such as Network Insight, Log Intelligence and Cost Insight helped customer gain operational insight into their clouds.

Combining these operational services with the automation services from Cloud Automation Services is another step into a Cloud Management Platform “as-a-service”. Going forward VMware will evolve these services with new features and functionality to govern resources even better across clouds. Next to that VMware will also deliver new services to address the growing need to manage cloud resources across clouds.

In the end VMware will provide the Cloud Services that will empower the IT Operations of its customers. They will be able to deliver cloud resources to their consumers while staying in control.

For more information go to  https://cloud.vmware.com