During VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco, VMware announced a new multi-cloud management solution called VMware Aria. This solution will be able to centralize multi-cloud management into a single console, single view with all the necessary deployment, management, automation, and cost management tools.
The tool will provide near real-time data, cost, automation, and operation. All will be integrated into a VMware Aria Hub and powered by VMware Aria Graph. It will truly be multi-cloud unified management.
VMware Aria is basically a portfolio of multi-cloud management offerings that is powered by VMware Aria Graph. Aria Graph is a graph-based data store technology built organically at VMware that captures the complexity of multi-cloud environments.
Today, multi-cloud environments represent offers from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle cloud or Alibaba cloud.
Aria Graph is an API that uses GraphQL model giving developers immediate access to this information and information about their applications (how they are configured, their dependencies, what’s the cost, and their performance…). All this is from a single central API.
The VMware Aria Hub isn’t that new as it was already introduced during VMworld 2021 as Project Ensemble.
Image courtesy of VMware.
VMware Aria Graph
Which components are present in VMware Aria?
VMware aria portfolio is composed of different products and (or) categories. There are components that have been renamed to fit the new offering.
- VMware Aria Cost – runs with Cloud Health
- VMware Aria Operations (previously vROPS)
- VMware Aria Automation (previously vRA)
There is more on top of VMware Aria Hub
In fact, VMware is announcing three new management services (for now in Tech Preview) that are built on top of VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph. Here are the details:
- VMware Aria Automation Guardrails – This will be able to automate enforcement of cloud networking, security, cost, performance, as well as configuration with multi-cloud environments with an “everything-as-code” approach.
- VMware Aria Migration – Will be able to migrate and accelerate the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution. Migration from on-rem or in between public/private clouds.
- VMware Aria Business Insights – Has the possibility to view and solve business insights from full-stack event correlation using machine learning and artificial intelligence AI/ML analytics.
VMware Aria Migration
VMware Aria Features
Highly Scalable – Supports Cloud-Native Environments
- Great scalability – Scales to hundreds of millions of nodes.
- Dependencies walkthrough – Graph data store captures relationships needed to fully understand dependencies.
- History view – Enables viewing historical configurations, critical in root cause analyses.
Event-Based Collection — Supports High Rate of Change
- Captures change events whenever they happen and track history.
- Captures full granularity.
Federated and Modular Architecture — Enables Aggregation of Data from any Source
- It has a “Plug-and-play” approach which allows you to layer data from third-party tools to help for more precise results.
- Brings and aligns operational data to a single, holistic source of truth that allows your dev, management and security teams to make better decisions and work more efficiently.
Unified GraphQL API — Simplifies Consumption by Both Developers and Operations Teams
- Is able to create a single, developer-friendly UI for multi-cloud environments that can expand to other cloud environments outside of the supported ones.
- Precise GraphQL queries provide lightning quick and extremely efficient access to data
VMware Aria Hub
New Unified Observability platform
The new Unified Observability Platform from VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly VMware Tanzu Observability) provides comprehensive and simplified visibility for multi-cloud environments. To the existing features, VMware adds log file management capabilities to provide contextual data (traces, metrics, and logs). As a result, users can collect more actionable insights and massively reduce their average problem resolution times (MTTR).
The platform unifies visible data, insights, and actions across the system, and offers custom, out-of-the-box dashboards for apps. Over 250 integrations with partner products are available to start capturing real-time data from any source in minutes.
With the trend toward container deployment on-premises, in public clouds, and at the network edge, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 provides a streamlined experience for lifecycle management and provisioning of Kubernetes clusters. The solution now provides more flexibility and control for creating clusters with Cluster Class, alignment with open-source APIs, application lifecycle management capabilities, and tools based on the Carvel suite.
Solved problems with Aria?
Admins often ask questions that VMware Aria is trying to solve. Questions like:
- How to decide which app to deploy to which cloud?
- How do I improve performance and optimize cost?
- Is there a common policy that can be used to deploy apps across clusters and different public clouds?
- Will I get a view of costs, performance, and security with all those supported multi-cloud environments?
Evolution into a new Kubernetes Multi-cloud
Integrated into vSphere 8, the Carvel suite enables customers to transform their existing IT infrastructure into an enterprise Kubernetes environment deployed across multiple clouds.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid also supports smaller, single-controller-node clusters, and can (via VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0) support a single worker node, making the enterprise edge simpler, easier and elastic.
VMware also unveiled new features and enhancements to VMware Cross-Cloud to help customers evolve in the multi-cloud era. VMware Cross-Cloud is a portfolio of services that provides the capabilities needed to build, operate, access, and secure any application on any cloud from any device.
Final Words
VMware multi-cloud era has just started and it is not about to finish. The customer and clients asking for a more transparent view of performance, management and cost. And that’s what the new VMware Aria is about to bring with vSphere 8 as a abase brick of the virtualization solution.
VMware Aria Graph APIs introduce and bring programmatic access to the Aria Graph platform that greatly simplifies the integration with VMware Cloud Management.
The on-prem workloads are still supported and will be, as long as there will be customers willing to install and maintain workloads locally.
