Microsoft Takes A Shot At VMware Cloud On AWS

You can’t expect Microsoft to be left out of the game, can you? The Redmond based technology giant has taken a big swing at VMware Cloud on AWS with new cloud offerings.

Azure has unveiled two new services designed to let enterprise brings more workloads to the cloud platform. First is a beta service for customers that run the VMware virtualization technology on top of the bare metal servers that Microsoft has available on its cloud.

This is designed to help users move their applications that rely on the VMware stack to Azure, and reap the benefits of that cloud platform without having to rework their systems.

The special deployment of VMware technology on Azure datacenters will be collocated with other Azure services, and will help these customers connect those applications to higher level services in the Microsoft cloud.

The company says that the service is slated for general availability next year.

On top of that, Microsoft has also announced another service called Azure Migrate, which will make it easier for people to bring their VMware workloads to the cloud without using a special service.

Upon deployment in their private datacenters, the system will analyze all the VMware workloads that an enterprise has running, and then provide administrators with a way to move their applications to the public cloud using the Azure Site Recovery Service.

This service will be available for free starting next year.

Both these services are Microsoft taking an aim at VMware Cloud on AWS, a service that Amazon Web Services and VMware put together to let customers run their VMware workloads on bare metal hardware on the Amazon cloud.

VMware Cloud on AWS was announced around a year ago, and entered general availability earlier this year, as part of the strategy Amazon is pursuing to help bring enterprise users to its cloud platform.

All of this comes a week before AWS is holding its major re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, where the cloud leader is supposed to unveil a host of new services and features, including new offerings centered around artificial intelligence.

No one ever said cloud was easy.