Following a packed second day featuring a keynote with the core message that 'the future cloud for organizations is the Private Cloud,' today we are focusing on what that means for VMware's products. Cloud is attractive, primarily due to its commercial model centered on consumption-based usage. Furthermore, Public Cloud/Hyperscalers offer a menu of services accessible via APIs, making automation with DevOps straightforward.

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

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Aria Automation – accelerating deployment

Aria Automation acts as the glue for all automation within the VCF products that form the platform services on top of the infrastructure. For example, consider the Private AI solution, where Aria Automation enables a catalog of projects and environments for data scientists to work in. Here, automation ensures that a complete environment is set up from the infrastructure level, including containers and Nvidia NIM (containers containing all the software tools required to deploy AI training or inferencing).

Cloud Director

The role of Aria Automation also hints at a shift in the role of Cloud Director: the service portal that Fundaments uses to provide virtual data centers with compute, storage, and networking. Functionalities for this are also being integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation, with Aria Automation set to take over a significant portion of these tasks.

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Aria Operations & sustainable IT

The other Aria product, Operations, forms the foundation for insight and analysis across all technical components. One of the impressive developments showcased focuses on sustainability. A vast array of metrics can be read and analyzed from the infrastructure and the platform above it. This provides insights into energy consumption and identifies opportunities for savings. Integrations that link additional data to this product yield valuable insights, which apply not only to the total infrastructure but also to specific business applications or resource utilization.

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This granularity provides our customers with deep insights, allowing for highly specific improvements. Many excellent examples are also provided by the VMware community: here and here.