News

VMware Debuts New Single Offering for Multi-Cloud Management: Aria

• By David Ramel
• 08/30/2022

Multi-cloud is too complicated, says VMware, which just announced a new family of management tools designed to simplify things.

At the start of this week's big in-person VMware Explore event in San Francisco, the company unveiled VMware Aria for multi-cloud management.

The new portfolio of separate offerings seeks to reduces multi-cloud complexity across any cloud or app by making multi-cloud completely invisible, the company said.

Standing out in those offerings is VMware Aria Graph, which provides graph-based data store technology at cloud scale, aiming to capture the resources and relationship complexity of multi-cloud environments, including applications, users, configurations and associated dependencies.

It serves as a hub anchor for all core management solutions, including VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Automation. In fact, Aria is positioned as the company's single cloud management offering, taking over from previous vRealize (cloud management) products for automation, operations, operations for networks and operations for logs. So it's now Aria Automation replacing vRealize Automation, and so on. The company said users of vRealize products will be entitled to corresponding Aria offerings.

"VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time and was expressly designed for the operational challenges of cloud-native applications and environments," said the company in an Aug. 30 blog post, which listed these key capabilities:

• Highly Scalable -- Supports Cloud-Native Environments
  • Scales to hundreds of millions of nodes
  • Graph data store captures relationships needed to fully understand dependencies
  • Enables viewing historical configurations, critical in root cause analyses
• Event-Based Collection -- Supports High Rate of Change
  • Captures change events whenever they happen
  • Captures full granularity
• Federated and Modular Architecture -- Enables Aggregation of Data from any Source
  • Plug-and-play approach allows you to layer data from third-party tools
  • Aligns operational data to a single, holistic source of truth, enabling teams to make better decisions and work more efficiently
• Unified GraphQL API -- Simplifies Consumption by Both Developers and Operations Teams
  • Establishes a single, dev-friendly, consistent interface to multi-cloud environments
  • Precise GraphQL queries provide lightning quick and extremely efficient access to data

"With multi-cloud realities taking hold, managing overall cloud spend, resource utilization, and application performance, security and compliance across different clouds can be increasingly difficult, and consequently, can lead to overspending, inefficiencies, and increased risk," said VMware exec Purnima Padmanabhan in a news release. "Developers need cost, performance, security, and configuration data -- often sitting in disparate tools -- to understand the complete characteristics of the application that they are building."

Padmanabhan noted that it also serves other personas in addition to developers: "VMware Aria's API-first approach enables developers, SREs and Platform Engineering teams to pull relevant, correlated data from any source for quicker application analysis and debugging, while providing complete visibility into the cost, performance, and configuration of applications and workloads across cloud environments for Platform Ops, IT Ops, and Cloud Ops teams."

Several of the offerings under the new Aria name are in beta or preview stages.