Stay up to date with the VMware Cloud on AWS roadmap

VMware Cloud on AWS has emerged as a dynamic and evolving service that continues to plan and introduce new features and functionality over time. VMware maintains a searchable roadmap of VMware Cloud on AWS, and potential adopters can easily follow features as they move from planning and development through preview and into general availability.

For example, VMware moved two SDKs into preview in late November 2018: a vSphere Automation SDK allows programmatic access to compute resources, while a vSAN Management SDK allows programmatic access to storage resources. VMware vCenter Server manages both. Integration between VMware vSAN and Amazon Elastic Block Store for greater storage scalability and reduced overall total cost of ownership is also in preview.

One planned feature includes a change to VMware Site Recovery, which improves disaster recovery testing by enabling the tool to autonomously add and remove host capacity for testing, which takes away the need for human decision-making in setting up and configuring DR tests. Another planned feature builds on VMware Site Recovery by enabling the tool to protect up to 2,000 VMs per VMware Cloud on AWS deployment.

Although there is no guarantee that planned or developing features will actually reach general availability, the presence of a vendor roadmap enables potential adopters to follow the service's evolution and look ahead to possible new capabilities and use cases that can benefit their business.

Public cloud adoption takes one of two paths: creating new workloads that can run in the cloud or moving existing workloads from local data centers to the cloud. Complex workloads are more expensive to refactor for the cloud and might not readily migrate to cloud services. The introduction of frameworks such as VMware Cloud on AWS seeks to offer a compromise. Rather than forcing a large business to resemble a cloud, the cloud can provide a platform that more closely resembles the environment, tools and services found in a virtualized data center. This effectively extends a local data center to the cloud without the complexities of building private and hybrid clouds.