A few weeks ago Raghu, during his general session at VMware Explore, unveiled VMware Aria in the center of the main stage exploring how it can bring peace to the Cloud Chaos caused by the great but still disorganized cloud adoption during the past few years, leading companies from every size to live with a disparate set of tools, siloed teams, miss-configurations, lack of compliance and even high unnecessary expends. You can still catch the replay here.
First and foremost what Aria means?
It has a musical meaning; the word is used to describe a piece for voice. That piece could be an instrumental accompaniment or be solo, and is usually part of a longer work, like an opera. Sing with One Voice
It makes perfect sense because VMware Aria is all about bringing everything together, from cost, and performance to configuration into a single central management console, something that has never been seen before.
Another common mistake is to think it's a simple rebrand of vRealize Suite. Not the case !!
Although VMware Aria will benefit from several solutions that you already own and love, meaning you can leverage everything you have built so far, including the knowledge you acquired along the road, also brings to the table new groundbreaking technology such as Aria Hub and Aria Graph:
Let me give you an overview of the entire VMware Aria portfolio:
Aria Hub: That's the centralized multi-cloud management portal where you can see and manage your entire fleet of apps, from Cloud Native to on-prem workloads. Along with your App details, you will see dependencies/relationships, cost, performance metrics, security information, and more without the need to jump from screen to screen;
Aria Graph: the database powering Aria Hub. Designed for the challenges of the cloud world, being able to ingest billions of data points from different sources, and correlate and federate them in a way to make consumption much easier.
Aria Guardrails: a high-level policy definition to enforce your desired state on your environment, network, cloud accounts, organizations, and more. But also to be able to remediate your settings as drift occurs;
Aria Business Insights: dozens of events and alerts coming these days from different sources, Which one is critical ? Which one is relevant? Which one is simple noise ? That's the goal of this AI, leveraging ML to present you the relevant insights so you can take actions to remediate your app, which could be a performance anomaly or a suddenly cost increase, or even a security vulnerability;
Aria Migration: designed to help migrate your workloads to the cloud taking into consideration cost, performance impact, and dependencies, allowing you to schedule when the migration will occur. All of this with a rich set of pipelines for you to customize adding extra steps and approvals along the way;
Aria Cost (formerly CloudHealth): a complete FinOps platform that simplifies financial management, streamlines operations and improves cross-organization collaboration across multi-cloud environments;
Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation): Modern automation platform allowing self-service cloud consumption with governance and Dev-Ops based infrastructure management;
Aria Automation Assembler (formerly Cloud Assembly): part of Aria Automation in charge of the creation and design of end-to-end services and offers to be consumed by end-users;
Aria Automation Consumption (formerly Service Broker): part of Aria Automation responsible for Catalog presentation, approval policies and governance;
Aria Automation Pipelines (formerly Code Stream): part of Aria Automation providing pipelines services for CI/CD activities;
Aria Automation Config (formerly SaltStack Config): It's VMware's configuration management solution to configure systems, install products on-demand, enforce policies and guidelines, remediation, Vulnerability and compliance checks remediations;
Aria Automation Orchestrator (formerly Orchestrator): it's a long-time VMware veteran in charge of extensibilities beyond what's provided out of the box, with hundreds of plugins available so you can extend your solution far beyond;
Aria Automation for Secure Clouds
(formerly CloudHealthSecure State): Find risks and misconfiguration by
visualizing and correlating resources for faster response and
remediation to protect your cloud environments;
Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations): enables self-driving IT Operations delivering continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization;
Aria Operations for Applications (formerly Tanzu Observability and before that Wavefront): provides unified observability for your applications covering metrics, logs, traces, and events from a single source of truth for greater business agility with unmatches scalability in the millions of points per second;
Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight): Centralized log management with deep operational visibility and intelligent analytics for troubleshooting and auditing;
Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight): Manage your network at scale with intelligent application discovery, analytics and troubleshooting to help you identify trends, patterns and even not allowed traffic;
Aria Operations for Integrations (formerly vRealize True Visibility Suite): Extend Aria Operations to data depth and context to additions solutions, like physical datastore, applications, networks and more;
If you got this far, thanks a lot.
I'm sure now you understand how all those details can be brought together for a comprehensive understanding of your applications, making your life much easier !!
