VMworld 2018 sees new VMware cloud operations services drop

At VMworld 2018, VMWare addressed the challenges of multi-­cloud environments head-­on, announcing new and enhanced VMware Cloud Services that will enable cloud operations, DevOps, and security and compliance teams to better manage cloud costs, operations, security, and compliance across clouds. The advancements to VMware’s cloud operations platform included new cloud automation services, VMware Cloud Assembly, VMware Service Broker, and VMware Code Stream; a new cloud configuration security and compliance service, VMware Secure State; and significant enhancements to Wavefront by VMware.

Across industries, businesses are on the path to multi-­cloud adoption, with Forrester reporting that 89 percent of enterprises use at least two clouds and 74 percent are using at least three or more public clouds. With the explosive growth in public cloud, organizations are struggling with disparate tools and processes to gain visibility, enforce compliance, and ensure application performance. VMware Cloud Services delivers a unified platform for helping Cloud Engineering and Operations teams customers get visibility into their cloud resources, manage costs, drive efficiency with resource management, and gain real-time configuration compliance with automation and insights.

“VMware’s vision is to deliver an integrated set of cloud services that address these challenges in a unified way that works consistently across native public clouds and the private cloud,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “Through our comprehensive cloud operations platform, customers will be better equipped to create value, improve business performance and reduce risk by more effectively managing, securing and operating workloads in the cloud.”

VMware Cloud Automation Combines Application Delivery Velocity with Platform Reliability VMware’s cloud automation services make it "easy and efficient for developers to build and deploy applications." The cloud automation services consist of VMware Cloud Assembly, VMware Service Broker and VMware Code Stream. Together, these services streamline application delivery, enable cloud flexibility and choice, and control risks. Additionally, these services facilitate collaboration between traditionally siloed groups helping further accelerate business innovation.  

VMware Cloud Assembly: Developers want the same experience of automating deployment and consumption of infrastructure and applications in private and hybrid clouds as they get with public clouds. Cloud Assembly delivers unified provisioning across all clouds through declarative Infrastructure as Code, including VMware Cloud on AWS, native AWS, and Azure. With Cloud Assembly, IT and cloud operations teams can orchestrate and expedite infrastructure and application delivery in line with DevOps principles, improving the overall developer experience, Developers get an experience equivalent to provisioning resources from native public clouds.

VMware Service Broker: Service Broker provides simple, self-service access to multi‐cloud infrastructure and application resources from a single catalog, without requiring disparate tools. With Service Broker, operations teams can more effectively govern resource access and use and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multi-cloud environments.

VMware Code Stream: Enterprise development teams are creating and iterating on applications faster than ever, but this work is often delivered using a combination of manual scripting and a mix of delivery tools. This creates challenges with delivery speed, visibility, and troubleshooting for code releases. Code Stream automates the code and application release process with a comprehensive set of capabilities for application deployment, testing, and troubleshooting. It features integrations with popular developer tools and supports VMware-based private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS, and AWS and Azure public clouds. With Code Stream, enterprises get code and applications out faster and reduce the time it takes to correct issues when they arise.

VMware Secure State

Clouds are extremely dynamic. The scope, scale, context, and rate of configuration changes left unchecked can prove to be disastrous to the business. VMware Secure State addresses violations in cloud configurations in real time by automating configuration security and compliance monitoring in native cloud environments. VMware Secure State provides:

• Security Insights: Indexes cloud assets and builds a cloud infrastructure model to efficiently find common cloud-native vulnerabilities, as well as an emerging class of “connected threats” across configured cloud service layers. Provides contextual information and a “threat chain” for objects with associated cloud object relationships.
   
• Real-Time Detection: Tracks all changes to the cloud infrastructure in real-time, providing fast notifications for object changes and the related services that may be affected. VMware Secure State proactively scales configuration security insights across security, cloud engineering, and DevOps teams.
   
• Continuous Compliance: Includes out of the box compliance monitoring and reporting to provide overarching and targeted on-demand compliance benchmark reporting.

At VM World 2018: Wavefront by VMware

Wavefront by VMware is a cloud-native monitoring and analytics platform that gives DevOps, developer, and site reliability engineering teams instant insight into the performance of highly distributed, web-scale applications. This Wavefront update includes new enhancements including:

• Massive container scalability: Based on internal testing, VMware has validated that Wavefront can ingest, analyze, and visualize metrics data from an environment running 100,000 containers.
   
• Comprehensive Kubernetes Support: Wavefront provides holistic Kubernetes metrics insight to help ensure no monitoring blind spots. Building on the integration with Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Wavefront has added quick start from within PKS; programmatic enforcement of pre-defined alerts for important KPIs across desired Kubernetes clusters and components; and kube-state metrics to gain a holistic understanding of the health of Kubernetes within PKS.
   
• Serverless Application Monitoring: New Lambda SDK and dashboards enable developers to deliver serverless code with greater speed, accuracy, and reliability. Delta Counters, a new metric type, delivers more accurate reporting.

New Visualizations and AWS UX Enhancements: New features provide real-time visibility into applications using public cloud, containerized, and microservices topologies. Wavefront’s new AWS dashboards accelerate incident resolution time by quickly visualizing where an incident is happening and seamlessly drilling down to the asset of suspected cause. New metric visualization widgets help identify anomalies and incident causes faster.