Blog
21 April, 2024
In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business landscape, companies require a flexible and scalable infrastructure that can keep up with their growth and changing needs. Many organizations are turning to multi-cloud strategies to achieve this, leveraging the strengths of various public cloud providers to create a seamless and optimized IT environment.
However, managing a multi-cloud environment can be challenging, with different platforms, tools, and policies to navigate. As of the VMware Explore 2022 conference, VMware – a company that has traditionally dominated the private cloud and on-premise market – has taken a bold step toward leading the industry in multi-cloud management with the introduction of a new product line and a new approach that they’re calling VMware Aria.
VMware Aria is a new solution that aims to simplify multi-cloud infrastructure migration and management. Aria Cost (previously Cloud Health) allows customers to manage the cost of their applications across different public clouds. Aria Operations gives users visibility of the logs, networking, application, Tanzu observability, and metadata about their applications and deployments across all platforms. Aria Automation allows users to deploy workloads and pipelines using one portal for AWS and vSphere with all the flexibility, governance, regulations, and automation that Aria Automation provides.
Now, with the collaboration of all these products, VMware has introduced a new product, Aria Guardrails. Aria Guardrails are policy enforcement tools that enable users to create templates for new or existing environments and enforce security policies, governance policies, or best practices for different clouds. Guardrails can also scan and mitigate drifts in the environment and alert users of any issues that may arise. One of the challenges in the public cloud is maintaining a balance between the flexibility and freedom of public clouds to do anything users want and having control and understanding of what’s happening in the environment. Guardrails helps organizations maintain control and visibility over their environment and avoid any “dark IT” scenarios.
With Guardrails, companies can create templates and share them between customers and the community, ensuring best practices and security policies are enforced across their multi-cloud environment. It can also scan and mitigate any drifts in the infrastructure, providing a single management plane for all public clouds.
Further, Aria Business Insights feature provides visibility into all clouds, deployments, and dependencies, enabling organizations to optimize their IT spending and performance. The tool can recommend which public cloud to run deployment or resources and save companies time and money.
Aria Migration, another component of the solution, helps plan and execute migrations of VMs between different public clouds, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, with a simple, user-friendly interface. With the Aria Migration tool, companies can migrate hundreds or even thousands of VMs in waves or based on other plans that fit their needs.
While Aria’s products are still in their early releases, they are already showing promise. Some features are available for free, allowing organizations to test and play with them to see how they work. In the coming months, we can expect many more releases and features around this portfolio, making multi-cloud infrastructure migration and management even more accessible and streamlined.
VMware’s Aria portfolio represents a significant shift in the company’s vision, aiming to revolutionize public cloud management in a single, comprehensive solution. This exciting new solution promises to simplify and streamline multi-cloud infrastructure migration and management. The approach is ambitious, but if successful, it will be a game-changer for many customers around the world.
At TeraSky, we’ll eagerly await every new VMware Aria update and release as they roll out in the coming months. We’re committed to helping companies on this journey, providing expert advice and guidance in implementing VMware Aria to meet their specific business needs – and maybe even achieve things they never thought possible.
Written by: Yev Berman, Head of Cloud Delivery