You're not familiar with the operational costs of most Fortune 100 data centers (and more importantly, basic services built on top of a reliable infrastructure) if this sounds eye-watering expensive. Almost everyone I've ever moved to AWS is pretty bad at O&S and pays at least double the monthly costs of AWS for far worse systemic reliability. Add in AWS support being far, far better by every metric than whatever crappy offshore helplessdesk was contracted and it's a no-brainer. Delta's recent debacle just wouldn't have happened, for starters, and that's costing them more than a billion dollars in raw costs.
I am familiar enough with that. Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage.
But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense.
If you want to have special snowflakes, you go for SoftLayer + VmWare. You can be as exotic as you want with that.
Otherwise, just use AWS. And you get the benefit of all the services that VMWare don't and can't provide. (servers, storage, load balancer, databases...).
Better, go for GCE. It's the same as AWS for 20-50% cheaper. :D
AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.
If you're my customers? AWS + VMware makes plenty of sense because you have gazillions of dollars sunk into vSphere management and automation that's narrowly tailored to the enterprise's needs. Making the case that all of that prior work should be abandoned or phased out in favor of going all-in on AWS is a difficult up-hill battle in these situations.
>AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.
This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.
VMware is the de facto private cloud incumbent and switching costs are incredibly high, and AWS is the de facto enterprise public cloud incumbent with perhaps even higher switching costs and the same kind of inertia as legacy on-premises systems. What this signals to me is that the "hybrid cloud" management voodoo software that's been peddled for years by various vendors isn't sufficient enough to keep VMware viable enough on its own, and VMware wants to partner with the incumbent enterprise public cloud for continued relevance rather than to risk partnering with anyone that's competing against AWS.
GCE has so little of the enterprise compliance and security solutions engineering bureaucracy that enterprises love to spend tens of millions of dollars and years doing POCs with it's just not viable at this time.
Say I have 30,000 VMs deployed in my VMWare infrastructure. I have a good licensing agreement with them and have thousands of applications.
By just shifting workload to AWS without doing anything to the VM, I can save a ton of money. In my case, for every dollar I spend on AWS/VMWare, I could probably avoid spending $2.50 in data center buildout costs and $3 in application rationalization.
With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
> With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
Not a very accurate statement. SoftLayer is IaaS, everything is monthly or hourly on the compute, storage, and networking side. You pay SoftLayer monthly for VSphere 6 licenses with zero contracts.
> Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage.
This is 100% false. Unless you are running your infrastructure at less than 50% utilization 24/7, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to go to "the cloud".
Depends if you can replicate to S3 and spin up as a DR site when you need it, you will be paying for it, but it shouldn't kill the bank for the corps who would look at this.
That would be the killer use case, to use AWS low cost storage while being able to stand up your entire infrastructure.
That was my first thought... though I do think that some of VMWare's orchestration tools are a bit easier than AWS's... just the same, I'm thinking, wow that sounds expensive. Now I'm waiting for Oracle to buy out VMWare if this even looks like it will succeed.
Not totally kidding. There's a subset of the market for whom being more expensive both in complexity and cost is seen as an obvious sign of a more "serious" "enterprise" product.
