Dealing with digital disruption
VMware Cloud on AWS, the jointly engineered SDDC-as-a-Service offering by VMware and AWS, is filling an important gap in the public cloud market. Everyone agrees that – at least for now – the ultimate goal for every company looking at digital transformation as a means to survive in a world that’s being eaten up by software- and technology disruption, is to modernize the application landscape into a cloud native application landscape. Cloud native is an approach to building and running applications that exploits the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Cloud-native is about how applications are created and deployed, not where.

“An idea in the morning is running production in the evening”
Traditional or legacy applications are inflexible, hard to manage, difficult to life cycle manage, unscalable and often have a very long time to market. By transforming these applications into cloud native applications, a company can greatly improve agility and obtain a competitive advantage on its competitors by being able to respond more swiftly to changes in the market. An often-used quote in this context is “an idea in the morning is running production in the evening”. That’s only possible when you embrace the cloud native apps paradigm shift.

Dealing with legacy applications
That is not an easy task. If you are not a “born in the cloud company”, you are likely running a lot of these traditional, legacy applications in your data centers. Breaking these monolithic applications apart and rebuilding them following the 12-factor methodology is not an easy task. What if you no longer possess the source code, or what if it is a vendor provided commercial off-the shelf application? In these cases, you will not be able to completely refactor the application following cloud native principles. Does this mean you’re stuck in limbo? Is your company doomed to get disrupted by new cloud native startups?

Delivering agility, bottom up!
Thankfully, there is a middle ground with means to deliver agility “bottom up”. With bottom up, I’m referring to making the underlying infrastructure (on which traditional apps rely heavily) more agile. With VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) you can consume a complete SDDC stack “as a service” by the touch of a button. You are now able to easily migrate your traditional workloads running on vSphere into the AWS global cloud infrastructure without major disruption. Besides the benefits of delivering a constent infrastructure and consistent operations, a key differentiator of VMC is the ability to natively integrate and consume AWS services. With these AWS services you can start picking apart your traditional applications from an infrastructure perspective. You can replace your traditional, inflexible and costly frontend load balancer with an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) You can rip out your underlying, hard to scale and expensive database and replace It with a flexible and fully managed AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). You can integrate AWS’ highly scalable global DNS service (Route 53) and the CloudFront distribution network to quickly deliver services anywhere in the world. The possibilities are endless. And you consume all these services on a pay per use base, truly flexibilizing your costs.

VMware Cloud on AWS Inspiration Workshop and Proof of Concept, free of charge!
Are you interested in learning more about the possibilities of VMware Cloud on AWS and what this innovative cloud service can offer your company? ITQ is now offering a free of charge 4-hour inspiration workshop. During this workshop we will dive a bit deeper in the solution architecture of VMC and explore possible use cases for your company. By the end of this workshop there is clear agreement on if, and if so, which business objectives and which of your requirements align with VMware Cloud on AWS service capabilities. In close collaboration with VMware, there is even an opportunity to initiate a 2-weeks proof of concept, completely free of charge in which you can identify and validate your VMware Cloud on AWS use-cases.

If you have any questions about VMware Cloud on AWS, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] or +31 (6) 52 76 21 89. If you want to know more about the inspiration workshop and/or the Proof of Concept, take a look at https://itq.eu/vmware-cloud-on-aws-proof-of-concept/

Jeffrey Kusters CTO

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