28th August 2017

VMworld 2017 Announcements – VMware Cloud on AWS

In what was probably the most anticipated and perhaps least surprising announcement in the early press releases is the initial offering of VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware Cloud on AWS is being initially made available in the AWS US West (Oregon) region with plans to expand into AWS regions worldwide in 2018. Initial pricing options are hourly and pay only for each hour that a host is active in the cloud. Further details on pricing can be found at http://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/pricing, interesting there are planned discounts to customers with on-premises VMware vSphere, NSX, and/or vSAN licenses.

The prices for those hosts in the AWS cloud are currently listed at $8.31/hour, $6,109/month or offers and discounts available with reserved yearly pricing of $51,987/year or $109,366/3 years.

VMware Cloud on AWS promises the following features.

Enterprise capabilities of VMware SDDC with the agility, unmatched functionality, and operational expertise of AWS’s leading public cloud.
Identical skills, tools, and processes for managing private and public cloud environments so customers have consistent operations, improved productivity, and reduced costs.
Seamless, fast, and bi-directional workload portability between private and public clouds.
Flexibility to choose where to run applications based on business needs, while having access to a broad set of AWS services and infrastructure elasticity for VMware SDDC environments.
Rapid time to value with the ability to scale host capacity up or down in a few minutes, and spin up an entire VMware SDDC in under a couple hours.
Ability to run, manage, and secure applications in a hybrid IT environment without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite applications, or modify operating models.

With VMware the market share standard in the data centre, this offering sees them take that user familiarity and market share to assist in consolidating the hybrid cloud market. An area that Microsoft through Azure Stack have been aiming. Combined with other announcements today addressing security and extending and managing cloud networks, VMware are making a compelling argument for their Hybrid cloud solution.

Exciting times ahead, in the world of hybrid cloud.

Simon