VMware, at the VMworld 2018 conference today, announced it will be delving deeper in the realm of DevOps with the launch of a continuous delivery pipeline dubbed Code Stream.
In addition, VMware announced Cloud Assembly, a set of declarative tools that enable IT organizations to spin up a cloud in as little as 10 minutes by managing infrastructure as code, and Service Broker, a catalog through which services residing on multiple clouds can be published, governed and secured.
Milin Desai, vice president and general manager for the Cloud Services Business Unit of VMware, said these offerings extend the reach of VMware’s Cloud Automation Services that are all invoked as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
VMware also today announced a beta release of Secure State, a set of tools for tracking security alerts across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure that also can be used to investigate when changes to those environments were made. Secure Slate is based on the technology the company gained by acquiring CloudCoreo earlier this year. What’s more, VMware is updating the Wavefront by VMware monitoring service to add support for deeper support for containerized workloads running on Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS). Wavefront also now supports the Amazon Lambda serverless computing framework made available by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Code Stream is designed to track code across multiple platforms and comes with pre-built plug-ins for Wavefront, Harbor, Nexus, Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS), Ansible and Slack. VMware is also committed to providing integrations with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms such as Jenkins, Desai said.
VMware has previously made extensive investments in software-defined data centers (SDDCs) based on a layer of management software deployed on top of VMware vSphere. As part of that effort, VMware today announced version 6.7 of VMware vSphere, which adds tools for verifying the state of a virtual machine, and a new Platinum edition of the platform that includes VMware AppDefense, to secure application workloads running on VMware vSphere.
Beyond the virtual machine level, the scope of VMware’s DevOps portfolio has been limited. By adding a range of DevOps tools that are made available as SaaS applications, VMware now can provide tools spanning just about everything, from cloud orchestration to code delivery, Desai said.
The expanded push into DevOps comes at a time when VMware is also extending the scope of its alliance with AWS. The company earlier this week announced it has lowered the cost of entry of VMware for AWS by 50 percent for a limited time and is making available a three-node configuration option. Previously, VMware required customers to set up a minimum four-node configuration. VMware will enable IT organizations to configure a three-host software-defined data center (SDDC) for the cost of two hosts.
The company is further helping to reduce costs by make it possible for IT organizations to also specify the number of processor core counts for Oracle and Microsoft applications running on AWS, along with new options for deploying NSX network virtualization software.
It’s unclear to what degree VMware will be able to leverage its historic strengths in server virtualization to become a significant force in the realm of DevOps. The acquisition of Wavefront in last year was clearly a significant step in that direction. But the individuals with an IT organization who decide what virtual machines to employ are not necessarily the same individuals selecting DevOps tools. VMware is clearly hoping that as more IT organizations embrace DevOps processes spanning multiple clouds, many more of them will view the company’s growing portfolio of SaaS applications as a natural extension.
