Both VMware and AWS recently renewed their Master Collaboration Agreement  (MCA)and for the first time established a “preferred cloud partnership” as both companies continue to deliver VMware Cloud on AWS. In essence VMware will promote AWS as their preferred public cloud vendor of choice for vSphere deployments and AWS will do the same telling customers it prefers VMware cloud on AWS for a vSphere hosted platform.  VMware often tells customers that AWS is the cloud it prefers for its own internal product development so this should come as no surprise.

VMC has notched a 250% year over year expansion in the total number of hosts it’s deployed and over 350% in total VMS. With over 300 validated third party solutions, a strong marketplace and over 500 partners with VMC certifications, VMC on AWS is picking up massive steam so I’m going to give just a few use cases below but the possibilities are endless.

There is a large skillset gap between traditional data center engineers and cloud native engineers.  With VMC,  your existing data center engineers can use the same tool sets they’ve been accustomed to for on-premise management.  Let’s face it while we know everything is going infrastructure as code, there aren’t many organizations who have embraced Dev/Ops for infrastructure operations.   Almost every time I mention DevOps to a datacenter team, they get nervous and tell me to talk to the dev team.   I get it, it’s a big change and VMC on AWS can help fill the skills gap while staff can get brought up to speed on cloud native skills.

Many of you know I’m a huge cloud native proponent so when this offering was released, I was a bit hesitant. I thought that it was just enabling the lift and shift mentality that has brought so many bad practices to the public cloud.  There are numerous use cases where this solution makes perfect sense. Obviously, disaster recovery and business continuity are top of mind however the recent pandemic has brought several more to the forefront like VDI and Contact Centers.

Living in Florida we get to experience all kinds of fun weather-related issues, not just hurricanes.  It’s always amazed me how many businesses have set up their disaster recovery in a data center not too far from their primary location.  What were these people thinking?  Most of these solutions are not fault tolerant or even HA and waste a ridiculous amount of money just sitting idlily by waiting for a “test” or an actual failover situation.  This is a great use case for VMC on AWS because you only pay for what you need when you need it, aside from some minimal supporting infrastructure.  If you want to test and see how a workload will perform in the cloud, simply migrate or copy it over to VMC on AWS and begin testing. 

If you need to start consuming cloud native resources like big data, ML & AI you simply move those workloads closer to the cloud native services you need to consume which cuts down on data transfer and processing time thereby improving efficiencies and decreasing costs.   This especially rings true with legacy or outdated software. You can immediately integrate cloud native resources like Lambda functions to access legacy systems/applications within you VMC cluster.

With COVID-19, everyone that could work from home had to work from home while other companies were left to figure it out and quickly.   Companies rushed to deploy solutions to enable remote workers and like anything rushed, not secure or tuned.  I fully expect to see a second wave of remote workforce initiatives kick off as companies look to expand their remote workforces.  We all know that VDI is a great remote workforce enabler.  Being able to quickly extend an on-premise VDI solution to the cloud provides immediate scale and capacity that can’t be achieved it in the traditional data center.  As more companies look to enable remote workforces, users can connect to native cloud resources and remove contention on existing data center resources. 

How do organizations like hospitals and financial institutions handle the increased call volume when an emergency happens?  How can government entities ensure capacity to assist their residents?   Contact centers are extremely difficult to scale from an infrastructure standpoint, employees and the telecom required to support operations.   With COVID, many state and local government became overwhelmed with the significant increase in call volumes. Several were unable to keep pace with the demand while others couldn’t increase or provision telco resources fast enough.   This is where Amazon Connect shines and pairs nicely with VMC on AWS.  With voice to text transcription and chat bots, many agencies can provide COVID related information to their customers without having to have an physical agent take the call; information such as testing facility locations, food bank information and available financial programs without tying up human and telco resources.    Something as simple as password resets being completed with bot services can alleviate an already overburdened IT support staff.  

With data center evacuations, digital transformations, security, remote workforce and business continuity top-of-mind for most executives,  VMC on AWS can definitely help any organization quickly adapt to these challenging times.   It’s great to see these two technology giants publicly affirming their partnership and should provide an extra level of security for those reluctant ones 😁.