Amazon recently announced the new AWS Management Portal for VMware’s vCenter, which is detailed in this blog post. This is yet another step in Amazon’s quest to land more enterprise workloads in its industry-leading public cloud infrastructure. While Amazon continues to dominate public cloud workloads, VMware is a serious player in the private cloud space due to its 56% share of the enterprise virtualization market.
VMware is counting on its base to help it win customers over with its hybrid and public cloud services. One of its advantages is that so many administrators have years of expertise with the VMware tools and don’t face a steep learning curve to adopt VMware’s hybrid and public cloud solutions. The new AWS plugin for vCenter lets administrators continue to use the tools they are familiar with to explore the AWS public cloud infrastructure, as shown in the image below.
This new plugin allows administrators to set up self-service provisioning of AWS resources with the familiar VMware vCenter. With just a simple click of a mouse, VM-based workloads and applications can be migrated over to AWS, something that surely is scaring the living daylights out of VMware execs.
The AWS plugin is free to use. Customers will pay only for the AWS resources they consume. This is a very smart play by AWS, because it makes it very simple for VMware users to kick the tires on AWS without having to learn a lot of new tools and terminologies. It also makes it easy to see how existing workloads function on AWS thanks to the migration capabilities.
One of Amazon’s strengths is its ability to bring new services to market quickly. It doesn’t announce what its roadmap is, but it continues to surprise and delight customers with features they ask for. Since the re:Invent conference last November, Amazon has continued to build upon an impressive catalog of services that are targeted toward enterprises. Expect Amazon to continue to deliver new services and enhance existing ones to make it more compelling and simpler for enterprises to move workloads to AWS.