After the fully packed second day featuring a keynote where the message was ‘the future Cloud for organisations is the Private Cloud’, today we reflect on what that subsequently means for VMware's products. After all, Cloud is attractive, mainly because of its commercial model where usage-based consumption is key. Public Cloud/Hyperscalers additionally offer a menu of services accessed over APIs, making automation with DevOps easy.

VMware now supports these concepts from the VMware Cloud Foundation product with two components: Aria Automation and Aria Operations.

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Aria Automation – accelerating deployment

Aria Automation is the glue in the automation of the VCF products that shape the platform services on top of the infrastructure, think for example of the Private AI solution where Aria Automation enables a catalogue of projects and environments for data scientists to work with. Herein, Automation ensures that a complete environment is set up from the infrastructure with containers and Nvidia NIM (containers with all the software tools needed to deploy AI training or inferencing).

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Cloud Director

The role of Aria Automation also hints at changing the role of Cloud Director: the service portal that Fundaments uses to provide virtual data centers with compute, storage and networking. Again, the functionalities will be integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation and Aria Automation will also accommodate much of it.

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Aria Operations & sustainable IT

The other Aria product, Operations, provides the base for insight and analysis on all technical components. One of the great developments shown is focused on sustainability. A lot of properties can be read and analyzed from the infrastructure and the parent platform. With this, insights can be given on what is used in terms of energy, but also how savings can be made. Integrations by linking additional data to this product give great insights. And these insights not only affect the total infrastructure, but also, for example, a business application or the use of company assets.

This granularity gives our customers in-depth insight and, as a result, enhancements can also be applied very precisely. Many great examples are also provided from the VMware community: here and here.