Nearly a year after signing a landmark deal to bring its software-defined data center technology to the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud, VMware Inc. kicked off its VMworld conference in Las Vegas today with the news that VMware Cloud on AWS is now generally available.

The service essentially enables the vast majority of companies that use VMware inside their data centers to use VMware software, which allows different operating systems and multiple applications to run on the same physical computer, with AWS services as well.

To date, companies have had difficulty moving workloads to Amazon’s cloud to take advantage of the cloud’s more flexible and lower-cost computing and storage services because many of their applications depended on VMware software that only ran on computers in company data centers. That presented customers of each provider with a tough choice: Use VMware technology it built its core applications on, but with none of the cost and flexibility of cloud computing, or use Amazon’s cloud, but not with the VMware software their data centers are built on.

“They hated this binary decision that we were forcing on them,” AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy (pictured, right) said during an appearance this morning at VMworld with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (left). Now, the executives said, customers can more easily use so-called hybrid cloud services that use both on-premises software and hardware and cloud services as needed.

“If this fully works, CIOs have no excuse in regard to moving VMWare loads to the cloud,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “But let’s see if this works.”

VMware, part of Dell Technologies Inc.’s constellation of companies that also includes storage supplier Dell EMC, also announced a raft of services for the VMware Cloud today. Initially, VMware Cloud is available in the AWS U.S. West region, but other regions will be added throughout 2018. VMware said the integration will enable customers to run applications across operationally consistent vSphere-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments with the option of expanding to AWS elastic or bare-metal infrastructure.

When the AWS-VMware deal was announced last October, it was apparent that it could reset the competitive environment in computing, in particular presenting new challenges for IBM Corp., which had signed a deal with VMware earlier in 2016, Google Inc.’s cloud platform and Microsoft Corp., whose No. 2-ranked Azure public cloud had claimed the lead in hybrid cloud computing.

The arrangement with AWS offers some benefits for VMware, including a connection to the leading public cloud provider that its customers have been clamoring for. “When your own cloud fails, you need to join the ones that work,” Mueller told SiliconANGLE. “VMware now focuses on add-on software, such as application security.”

But it also means AWS could steal some of VMware’s customers ultimately, if it results in what Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE Media’s Wikibon, has called a potential “one-way trip to Amazon ‘cloudville.'” Moreover, said Mueller, the arrangement “doesn’t help Dell sell more servers into an on-premises data center.”

As for Amazon, Mueller said, “AWS needs a piece of the on-premises enterprise load and this is the way.” He added that the fact that AWS is offering to host VMware instances on so-called bare-metal servers, those with no operating software installed on them, indicates how much it needs VMware’s help to reach large enterprise customers, since AWS had generally eschewed bare-metal arrangements.

The offering will be delivered, sold and supported by VMware as an on-demand service. It’s powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, a software-defined data center platform that includes vSphere, VMware VSAN and VMware NSX virtualization technologies managed by VMware vCenter. The initial set of cloud services includes six modules:

Discovery centralizes inventory information and cloud accounts across AWS, Microsoft Azure and VMware clouds, making it easier for information technology departments to search for and identify workloads. Administrators can group cloud resources even if they span multiple clouds. Built-in search and filters enables administrators to filter resources based upon cloud attributes.

AppDefense protects applications by embedding application control and threat detection and response capabilities into vSphere-based environments. It’s tightly integrated with the NSX networking platform, and operates within the vSphere hypervisor to create a knowledge base of the correct state and behavior of each endpoint for change detection.

Cost Insight helps organizations analyze their cloud spending and identify savings opportunities. It provides detailed visibility into public and private cloud costs on AWS, Azure and VMware environments and enables drill-down to identify cost drivers. Cost Insight also identifies stopped virtual machines and associated storage resources across public and private clouds to reduce waste.

Network Insight analyzes application traffic flows between different tiers, virtual and physical network layers and public and private clouds. This has application security and load balancing applications, and makes it easier for cloud administrators to manage and troubleshoot large-scale NSX deployments.

NSX Cloud provides a single management console and common application program interface for monitoring and securing applications that span multiple private and public clouds. It features a micro-segmentation security policy that can be defined once and applied to application workloads running anywhere.

Wavefront is a metrics monitoring and analytics platform that gives developers insight into the performance of highly-distributed cloud-native services to detect performance anomalies while enabling high availability. Operating on what VMware said is a “massive scale,” Wavefront gives DevOps teams instant visualization of millions of data points per second. This helps resolve bottlenecks more efficiently and proactively.

VMware also said it’s expanding Cloud Foundation’s scope with new partner offerings. They include support from CenturyLink Inc., Rackspace Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd. New hardware platforms that support Cloud Foundation include Dell EMC’s VxRack SDDC, Hitachi Data Systems Corp.’s UCP-RS, Fujitsu Primeflex and Quanta Cloud Technology LLC’s QxStack.

VMware’s shares closed up nearly 2 percent today, to about $104.68 a share, on a relatively flat day for the overall market.

With reporting from Robert Hof

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Photo: VMworld livestream screenshot