VMware advances multi-cloud management with VMware Aria

More organisations are delivering applications across public clouds and at the edge, and they're increasingly using Kubernetes to manage and scale their modernised and cloud-native apps.

However, managing apps and infrastructure in a multi-cloud, especially public cloud, and multi-technology environment is complex. Teams have to control costs, ensure performance, and manage consistent security policies across these diverse and distributed environments.

VMware has unveiled a multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications. Powering VMware Aria is VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store technology that captures the complexity of customers multi-cloud environments.

"With multi-cloud realities taking hold, managing overall cloud spend, resource utilisation, and application performance, security and compliance across different clouds can be increasingly difficult, and consequently, can lead to overspending, inefficiencies, and increased risk," says Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware.

"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.

"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."

VMware Aria features new and expanded capabilities for cloud native and multi-cloud management across three categories - VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware Aria Operations, and VMware Aria Automation. VMware Aria complements and extends management of the development, delivery, DevSecOps, and lifecycle of cloud-native apps in VMware Tanzu platform.

VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub, which provides centralised views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.

VMware Aria Graph and VMware Aria Hub: a new technology that powers VMware Aria

At the heart of VMware Aria's new public cloud management capabilities is VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store that captures the resources and relationships of a multi-cloud environment. Expressly designed for the operational challenges of cloud-native applications and environments, VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.

Leveraging a fundamentally different architecture to capture many-to-many relationships, scale to hundreds of millions of objects, and be updated in near-real time, VMware Aria Graph meets the multi-cloud management requirements of the largest and most demanding enterprise. VMware Aria's graph data store and API services enable it to seamlessly integrate with third-party solutions such as observability and application performance management tools. Data collected and normalised from native public clouds, on-prem clouds, VMware tools and third-party tools within Aria Graph enriches operations, automation, and cost metrics in customers existing VMware vRealize, CloudHealth by VMware and VMware Tanzu Observability products, bringing application-aware management to private/hybrid clouds in addition to native public clouds.

VMware Aria Graph will be made available to customers as a capability within VMware Aria Hub. First introduced at VMworld 2021 as Project Ensemble, VMware Aria Hub provides centralised views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment.

Key capabilities of VMware Aria Graph include:

• Highly scalable supports cloud native environments
• Scales to hundreds of millions of nodes
• Graph data store captures the many-to-many 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 on 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 ops teams
• Establishes a single, dev-friendly, consistent interface to multi-cloud environments
• Precise GraphQL queries provides lightning quick and extremely efficient access to data