Up until very recently, the Amazon AWS cloud[1] was very much its own protected, gated community. While much of the work in modernizing the deployment of applications in the data center was being shouldered by the open source community, especially with Kubernetes[2], AWS seemed keen to observe the proceedings from a safe distance, from behind its fortified castle walls.
Also: Pat Gelsinger: Dell a fan of VMware-AWS partnership[3]
Wednesday's joint announcement from VMware and AWS of two major commitments on data center infrastructure, those walls appear to have come a-tumblin' down.
- First, AWS' ambitious Outposts venture[4], allowing for Amazon-branded server hardware to host its cloud services on-premises, will also enable management of that hardware through VMware Cloud.
- Second, VMware Cloud Foundation on EC2 will allow existing VMware customer data centers that are deploying containerized apps with Kubernetes, to utilize AWS-based facilities, including hosting and storage.
Why move VMware Cloud from on-premises to AWS, then on-premises again?
At one level, the principal feature of Wednesday's announcement seems somewhat redundant. After all, back in October 2016, the two companies' initial agreement[5] was intended to extend data centers' existing boundaries into AWS public cloud territory, using VMware's NSX network virtualization system as the bridge builder. In other words, it became "VMware Cloud" when resources moved from on-premises to the public cloud.
The difference here isn't obvious at first, but it's very significant. Unlike those customers targeted by the 2016 announcement, other businesses built their data centers in Amazon's cloud to begin with. Outposts gives those customers an opportunity to build new infrastructure resources internally, without abandoning their investment in applications built using AWS' exclusive resources, such as S3 storage and RDS databases[6].