The success of the much-debated VMware Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. partnership is now irrefutable. As the naysayers slink away, theCUBE digs into the reason that this unlikely couple is a perfect match.

“It is no longer a discussion about migration. It is more of a discussion about modernizing what you have in place,” said Rima Olinger (pictured, right), global lead of VMware Cloud on AWS. “This is where this brilliancy [of] the collaboration between VMware and AWS is bringing to the table sets of tools and framework for customers, whether it’s security framework or networking framework, to make the pieces fit together.”

Olinger and Aarthi Raju (pictured, left), senior manager of solutions architecture at AWS, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the continued momentum of the AWS-VMware collaboration. (* Disclosure below.)

Multiple use cases with minimal complexity

Back when adopting cloud was an all-or-nothing proposition, VMware and AWS sat on opposite sides of the equation. But today’s cloud is hybrid. And as companies mix and match between on-premises and cloud, they need solutions that provide seamless operations regardless of the environment.

Together, VMware and AWS provide consistent infrastructure and operations across hybrid cloud environments, giving customers the choice of placing applications on-prem or in the cloud. This is an attraction for customers who had invested in VMware and didn’t want to move workloads or applications to the cloud because of risk, refactoring, or the additional investment involved, according to Olinger.

“They tend to gravitate towards this solution,” she said.

There are multiple customer use cases, according to Raju. “Admins for example, who might not be familiar with the AWS side of services, they can start with something simple like backing up,” she said.

This can tie in with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, which provides a low-cost DR solution. Raju is also seeing customers offload database management, taking advantage of the Amazon Relational Database Service.

“We’ve got that seamless connectivity that they can take advantage of with VMware Transit Connect; we’ve got the cross-account ENI model that we built that they can take advantage of,” she continued. “And we’re also seeing customers that take advantage of AWS services, like the web application firewall or shield, and integrating it with the VMware Cloud on AWS environment.”

Moving up the stack, customers can access containerization options using VMware Tanzu and other services that enable them “to take that jump into the modernization journey,” Raju said.

Home mortgage lender PennyMac Loan Services recently migrated its VDI infrastructure into VMware Cloud on AWS. This gave them the ability to scale their environment for remote workers as a response to COVID-19. Now, the company is continuing its modernization journey by building a completely serverless architecture using Lambda on the AWS cloud.

In short, AWS and VMware work together so that customers don’t have to worry about the complexity under the hood of hybrid operations.

“We want to abstract all that,” Raju stated. “We want to take that heavy lifting off the customers and help them focus on their business.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: the AWS Partner Network sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS Partner Network nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE