Amazon Sheds Light On AWS VMware Alliance

VMware was one of the biggest competitors for Amazon Web Services. That is, until recently, when the cloud giant was said to be considering a blockbuster partnership with the virtualization leader.

A partnership that many felt has the potential to disrupt and change the entire industry.

The question, then, remains what will a VMware powered cloud on AWS look like.

Luckily, Amazon Web Services is already here with an answer.

At its AWS Summit in San Francisco, the world’s leading provider of public cloud services provided some details on how exactly the two longtime rivals would work together, and what sort of efforts will AWS put behind this new endeavor.

Paul Bockelman, an AWS solutions architect, cleared the air at a session at the event:

“This is a VMware service. It’s not an AWS service. It’s a VMware service that’s sold by VMware and also managed and operated by VMware”.

So, basically, VMware Cloud on AWS has been jointly engineered to operate in its own gated community within the Amazon data centers, a walled garden, so to speak:

“If you’re running a VMware network, if you’re running a VMware data center, the way your network looks and operates and the way you operate and expand it and configure it is going to be much different from what you do with AWS.”

Bockelman did emphasize that this product is not nested virtualization, and instead bare-metal Amazon servers will be running the VMware ESX hypervisor, as many would expect of this high-profile collaboration between the two market leaders.

Customers, meanwhile, will still be able to access all the capabilities that the AWS cloud platform provides, like the S3 storage, the Relational Database Service, dedicated networking provided via the Direct Connect technology, Identity and Access management, and the Internet of Things platform.

And while these services will be available to customers, accessing them would require some serious tinkering, seeing as the way things are heading.

Demand for the integration of these AWS features, however, could generate a profitable line of business for solution providers that focus on implementing VMware Cloud on AWS.