VMware : Multi-cloud Management Gets an Upgrade with a New Free Tier Service

It's not easy for me to stay close-lipped about exciting new products and services we're developing before it's time to officially announce them. So I was happy that I was finally able to share the news about VMware Aria Hub and Aria Graph at VMware Explore US at the end of August in San Francisco. These additions dramatically uplevel multi-cloud observability and management.

That was the first big Aria announcement at VMware Explore. The second came two weeks ago at VMware Explore Europe in Barcelona, where we announced the new free tier of Aria Hub. VMware Aria Hub Free Tier is a free instance that allows users to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two native public cloud accounts (currently from either AWS or Microsoft Azure). This free tier offers users a glimpse into the power and utility of our Aria solutions and is available whether or not users are current VMware customers or have any other VMware products.

As the enterprise increasingly adopts multi-cloud architecture for infrastructure and applications, management complexity has emerged as one of its greatest challenges. Platform teams are struggling to wrangle cost, performance, security, and configuration data from a variety of outdated, disparate tools. It's a significant burden to bear. The new Aria products go a long way toward easing that pain. And Aria Hub Free Tier is an easy way to leverage the simplicity of Aria, without making additional infrastructure investments.

Aria Graph is the underlying "engine" of this new solution. While most users won't directly interact with this part of the solution, its graph-based data store captures the resources and relationships of multi-cloud environments, providing a near real-time map of all your applications and clouds. This is accompanied by management insights from existing VMware Aria solutions (formerly CloudHealth, vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, and vRealize Universal) and federated third-party management tools. Whether you're using public or hybrid clouds, this functionality substantially simplifies multi-cloud infrastructure and application management. Available within the new VMware Aria Hub, Aria Graph consolidates views and centralizes controls across your entire multi-cloud environment.

Other tools in the VMware Aria suite include VMware Aria Guardrails (which automates enforcement of networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration policies at scale), VMware Aria Operations, VMware Aria Automation, and VMware Aria Business Insights, which synthesizes data from full-stack event correlation, leveraging AI/ML analytics.

The entire suite of VMware Aria tools, now a single cloud offering, takes an "API-first" approach, which enables developers, site reliability engineers, and platform teams to retrieve the data they need from any source for quicker analysis and debugging. Coupled with the new ability to visualize and govern cost, performance, app config, and workloads across multiple clouds, it's a whole new ballgame - one that puts effective cloud-native development and application-aware management within reach. As a bonus, customers of VMware vRealize, CloudHealth by VMware Suite, and Tanzu Observability by Wavefront will be entitled to the corresponding VMware Aria offering.

You can see why it was hard for me to keep all this to myself. We've entered a whole new multi-cloud era - and now VMware has a complete, end-to-end solution for infrastructure, application development, and operations. Quite simply, it rocks!

Best,

Kit