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Building on plans to be announced today to build a “digital foundation” for companies using multiple cloud computing systems, VMware Inc. today unveiled a wide swath of new cloud services designed to help enterprises manage those operations.

VMware Cloud Services is a set of services that are aimed at homogenizing the cloud by providing a mechanism for customers to consume and manage public cloud infrastructure from a range of providers. The tools enable users to manage, provision and migrate workloads easily back and forth between on-premises and public cloud environments, while providing visibility into things such as available resources, cost management and compliance with regulations.

Today’s expansive updates, unveiled this morning at VMworld 2018, are designed to enhance those capabilities with a goal to streamline application delivery, enable cloud flexibility and choice, and control risks, the company said.

Or as Mahesh Kumar, senior director of VMware’s Cloud Services business unit, explained in a briefing last week, “In a nutshell, you’re talking about a completely automated cloud application development and deployment platform,” Mahesh Kumar, senior director of VMware’s Cloud Services business unit, explained in a briefing last week.

Or as VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger put it even more concisely this morning during his keynote: “The rule of the cloud is ruthlessly automate everything.”

For software developers, the most exciting new service will likely be VMware Cloud Automation, which is a suite of automation services that can help them build and deploy software apps more easily. Initially available today, the tools include VMware Cloud Assembly, which is aimed at DevOps teams and helps to unify the experience of automating the deployment and consumption of apps whether they’re hosted in private or public clouds or on-premises in corporate data centers. The VMware Service Broker, meanwhile, enables self-service access to multiple cloud infrastructures and application resources from a single portal, making it easier to control resource access and enforce compliance across environments.

The last tool in the Cloud Automation set is VMware Code Stream, which is used to automate coding and application release processes. The service can integrate with a variety of popular developer tools and supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware private clouds and VMware Cloud on AWS, which itself got some new updates Sunday evening.

Update: On Monday morning, VMware announced that it’s acquiring CloudHealth Technologies and its team of about 200 in Boston, and will turn it into its cloud management platform.

VMware said the deal will add “delivery of consistent operations across clouds” to its portfolio, complementing VMware’s existing cloud automation services, Secure State and Wavefront cloud monitoring and analytics platform. The acquisition is expected to close in the current quarter.

VMware is also adding a new service in beta test mode that’s meant to help reduce the risk of running workloads across multiple cloud environments. VMware Secure State, as it’s called, is essentially a monitoring tool that automates configuration security and compliance requirements in native cloud environments, delivering insights to IT teams that can help prevent any security incidents or breaches.

In addition, the company is providing monitoring tools on the application performance side. Generally available starting today, Wavefront by VMware delivers insights into the performance of up to 100,000 highly distributed web-scale applications running in software containers.

Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said he was impressed by the new services, which demonstrate a continued evolution of its core virtualization portfolio stack.

“VMware has significantly deepened its ability to scale and automate provisioning, monitoring, management, testing, analytics, troubleshooting and securing of applications across hybrid and multiclouds,” Kobielus said. “VMware is poised to become the go-to vendor unifying DevOps across complex multiclouds in which containers and serverless environments will eclipse the legacy hypervisor technology on which it has built its business these past two decades.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: VMware