Essential Guide

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Editor's note

After some initial stumbles during the early growth of the public cloud market, VMware has established a prominent role in the cloud computing world.

VMware Cloud on AWS, its flagship cloud service, enables IT administrators to migrate and burst on-premises VMware workloads to the AWS cloud. Despite its premium price, the platform has found success and continues to expand to new markets.

VMware has also acquired and developed technologies that position it as a competitive vendor of cloud management tools, as well as hybrid and multi-cloud services.

1VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS enables admins to run on-premises vSphere workloads in the AWS public cloud. Released in August 2017, VMware Cloud on AWS had a slow start, but software updates and wider availability helped the platform gain traction.

2Other VMware cloud partnerships, integrations

VMware isn't putting all its eggs in one basket. In addition to the partnership with AWS, the company announced similar integrations with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. VMware is also working to help admins bring cloud workloads back on premises.

3VMware cloud management tools

Cloud management is a big pain point for admins that VMware is trying to solve with several product releases and acquisitions, such as VMware Cost Insight and CloudHealth. But the company still has a ways to go in terms of integrating these services.

4VMware hybrid and multi-cloud

Hybrid cloud bridges the gap between the security and compliance of private clouds and the scalability of public clouds, which is appealing to admins who are hesitant to make the full jump. Multi-cloud environments provide even more flexibility, but add complexity.