Amazon RDS on VMware

Amazon RDS on VMware provides Amazon's relational database service for on-premises VMware infrastructure and points to the potential future of hybrid cloud services.

Many people used to see VMware and AWS as bitter enemies, but that changed when they announced VMware Cloud on AWS in 2017. The announcement of Amazon RDS on VMware at VMworld 2018 indicated an evolving relationship between the two companies that could point to potential. For greater collaboration between cloud vendors and on-premises infrastructure.

The investment required to move everything to the cloud has proved too expensive for many organizations, so as realistic expectations are set, more and more cloud vendors will try to integrate the features and benefits of the cloud with their on-premises infrastructure.

Amazon RDS aims to make it easy to set up, run and develop relational databases. RDS provides a flexible and easy way to do previously tedious tasks like patching, capacity management and database tuning. Because this is an Amazon service, it only offers on-demand pricing for what you use or pay for reserved, dedicated capacity. Until recently, Amazon limited this service to Amazon Cloud.

Amazon RDS on VMware is in Technical Preview, so all the details about how the platform works are currently unavailable. If it's anything like the native Amazon RDS, you'll be able to create and manage databases from half a dozen popular database types, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

Amazon RDS for VMware will enable the affordable, high-availability hybrid deployment, simple database disaster recovery for AWS, and read-only clones of on-premises data in AWS. This partnership could help Amazon customers easily migrate traditional database deployment from their sites and AWS, even sites with difficult licensing requirements. It can also help VMware customers see the benefits of the AWS management stack for databases in traditional infrastructure.

Amazon RDS Vs. VMware

Amazon has focused on moving workloads to the public cloud; Even VMware Cloud on AWS has focused on moving older workloads off-premises. Amazon RDS on VMware is different. With this release, Amazon is following Microsoft to provide public cloud services within the confines of the data centre.

Let's say Amazon continues to add its services to the data centre and continues to do the same with Microsoft Azure Stack. In that case, customers can see several major cloud benefits without the enormous effort of moving workloads to the public cloud. As much as the industry has talked about hybrid cloud, most customers haven't implemented it.

It takes a major investment for customers to achieve the flexibility, ease of consumption, agility and scale of the public cloud. Instead of making that investment, organizations often just put the time and effort into moving particular workloads to the cloud. As cloud providers look to expand the public cloud into a private data centre, customers can get the best of both worlds and have a true hybrid cloud model.

The ability to run Amazon services inside your data centre is all but Amazon admitting that the public cloud isn't the only way forward. Combine that with the fact that you can now run a traditional VMware on-premises infrastructure inside Amazon's public cloud, and you can see that the two companies have decided to have public, private, and hybrid clouds that all coexist.