New and enhanced VMware Cloud Services

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), addressed the challenges of multi-cloud environments head-on, by announcing new and enhanced VMware Cloud Services at VMworld® 2018, that will enable cloud operations, DevOps, and security and compliance teams to better manage cloud costs, operations, security, and compliance across clouds. The advancements to VMware’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) based cloud operations platform included new cloud automation services, VMware Cloud Assembly, VMware Service Broker, and VMware Code Stream; a new cloud configuration security and compliance service, VMware Secure State; and significant enhancements to Wavefront by VMware.

Across industries, businesses are on the path to multi-cloud adoption with Forrester reporting that 89 percent of enterprises use at least two clouds and 74 percent use at least three or more public clouds. With the explosive growth in public cloud, organizations are struggling with disparate tools and processes to gain visibility, enforce compliance, and ensure application performance. VMware Cloud Services build on the company’s recognized leadership in cloud management to deliver a unified platform for helping cloud engineering and operations teams get visibility into their cloud resources, manage costs, drive efficiency with resource management, and gain real-time configuration compliance with automation and insights.

“VMware is building on on the proven leadership of our VMware vRealize cloud management platform to deliver an integrated set of SaaS services that address cloud operations challenges in a unified way that works consistently across native public clouds and the private cloud,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “Through our comprehensive cloud operations platform, customers will be better equipped to create value, improve business performance and reduce risk by more effectively managing, securing and operating workloads in the cloud.”

VMware Cloud Automation Combines Application Delivery Velocity with Platform Reliability

VMware’s cloud automation services are a set of cloud services that leverage the award-winning vRealize Automation on-premises offering. These services make it easy and efficient for developers to build and deploy applications. The cloud automation services consist of VMware Cloud Assembly, VMware Service Broker, and VMware Code Stream. Together, these services streamline application delivery, enable cloud flexibility and choice, and control risks. Additionally, these services facilitate collaboration between traditionally siloed groups helping further accelerate business innovation.

  • VMware Cloud Assembly: Developers want the same experience of automating deployment and consumption of infrastructure and applications in private and hybrid clouds as they adopt public clouds. Cloud Assembly delivers unified provisioning across all clouds through declarative Infrastructure as Code, including AWS, Azure, and VMware Cloud on AWS. With Cloud Assembly, IT and cloud operations teams can orchestrate and expedite infrastructure and application delivery in line with DevOps principles, improving the overall developer experience, developers get an experience equivalent to provisioning resources from native public clouds.
  • VMware Service Broker: Service Broker provides simple, self-service access to multi-cloud infrastructure and application resources from a single catalog, without requiring disparate tools. With Service Broker, operations teams can more effectively govern resource access, and use and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multi-cloud environments.
  • VMware Code Stream: Enterprise development teams are creating and iterating on applications faster than ever, but this work is often delivered using a combination of manual scripting and a mix of delivery tools. This creates challenges with delivery speed, visibility, and troubleshooting for code releases. Code Stream automates the code and application release process with a comprehensive set of capabilities for application deployment, testing, and troubleshooting. It features integrations with popular developer tools and supports VMware-based private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS and native public clouds. With Code Stream enterprises get code and applications out faster and reduce the time it takes to correct issues when they arise.

VMware Secure State Helps Reduce Risk Across Multi-Cloud Environments

Clouds are extremely dynamic. The scope, scale, context, and rate of configuration changes left unchecked can prove to be disastrous to the business. VMware Secure State addresses violations in cloud configurations in real time by automating configuration security and compliance monitoring in native cloud environments. VMware Secure State allows organizations to scale actionable security insights across cloud teams, helps prevent costly security breaches and fosters innovation. VMware Secure State provides:

  • Security Insights: Indexes cloud assets and builds a cloud infrastructure model to efficiently find both common cloud-native vulnerabilities and an emerging class of “connected threats” across configured cloud service layers. Provides contextual information and a “threat chain” for objects with associated cloud object relationships.
  • Real-Time Detection: Tracks increasing security changes to the cloud infrastructure in real-time, providing fast notifications for object changes and the related services that may be affected. VMware Secure State proactively scales configuration security insights across security, cloud engineering, and DevOps teams.
  • Continuous Compliance: Includes out-of-the-box compliance monitoring and reporting to provide overarching and targeted on-demand compliance benchmark reporting.

Reliably Scale Digital Businesses with Advanced Monitoring and Analytics

Wavefront by VMware is a cloud-native monitoring and analytics platform that gives DevOps, developer, and site reliability engineering teams instant insight into the performance of highly distributed, web-scale applications. This Wavefront update includes new enhancements including:

  • Massive container scalability: Based on internal testing VMware has validated that Wavefront can ingest, analyze, and visualize metrics data from an environment running 100,000 containers.
  • Comprehensive Kubernetes Support: Wavefront provides holistic Kubernetes metrics insight to help prevent monitoring blind spots. Building on the integration with Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Wavefront has added quick start from within PKS; programmatic enforcement of pre-defined alerts for important KPIs across desired Kubernetes clusters and components; and kube-state metrics to gain a holistic understanding of the health of Kubernetes within PKS.
  • Serverless Application Monitoring: New Lambda SDK and dashboards enable developers to deliver serverless code with greater speed, accuracy, and reliability. Delta Counters, a new metric type, delivers more accurate reporting.
  • New Visualizations and AWS UX Enhancements: New features provide real-time visibility into applications using public cloud, containerized, and microservices topologies. Wavefront’s new AWS dashboards accelerate incident resolution time by quickly visualizing where an incident is happening and seamlessly drilling down to the asset of suspected cause. New metric visualization widgets help identify anomalies and incident causes faster.

Customer Commentary

“If you’re operating in public cloud understanding the security configuration is a must. Protecting your cloud security configuration is important because it makes sense to protect and audit security controls before you deploy instead of after,” said Anji Greene, director of security, Bazaarvoice. “Integrating with DevOps makes security proactive instead of reactive. VMware Secure State puts the right information in front of our DevOps and Security teams to help prevent cloud vulnerabilities.”

“SAIC was honored to participate in the beta program and all of the surrounding activities for VMware’s new cloud automation services, and to be able to share our input to help shape the service offerings,” said Steven Haas, solutions director for cloud integration, SAIC. “Over the course of the beta process, we saw significant improvements, such as inline-code in the designer, infrastructure as code support, and tighter integrations with the leading clouds. We hope these new features will improve our customers’ multi-cloud experience and enable us to expand the current services we deliver to the Federal government.”

“uShip is an online shipping platform that uses a DevOps approach that can see as many as 10 code releases pushed to production in a single day,” said Raleigh Schickel of uShip. “Our software engineers are the on-call team and they use Wavefront’s alerting and anomaly detection to monitor new code deployments and application health. Wavefront gives our team instant insights from a variety of data sources across the full stack, with a rich query language that allows us to build metrics and alerts that bridge data and team silos while monitoring broadly for the unexpected. We’ve tried to identify and solve some code problems with other solutions over the years, but we’ve never been able to crunch and analyze that data in a way that we can do with Wavefront.”

Have a comment? Type it below!