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Last week at AWS re:Invent, AWS and VMware made an interesting announcement. The launch of the beta program of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts.

Some lucky customers will be able to participate to the beta program before a general availability somewhere in 2020.

So what was VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts about again?

If you remember, VMware and AWS unveiled last year a new offering: “VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts”, to allow customers to take benefit of VMware Cloud on AWS, but on premise into their data center.

VMC on AWS Outpost is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation or VCF, and integrates the full SDDC stack that includes of course vSphere but also vSAN and NSX.

VMC on AWS Outposts offers also many benefits:

• Switch from a CapEx to an OpEx model
• Delivers innovative and cloud native apps on premise
• Manage your VMware SDDC on AWS Outposts hardware in your data center
• VMware is the single point of support and that includes also AWS hardware support and maintenance
• Possibility to migrate workload back from public cloud to on premise data center
• Provision workloads on premise that require low latency
• Gain public cloud agility and flexibility on premise
• Automating VMware SDDC software patches, updates and upgrades
• Ability to ship VMC on AWS Outposts on remote sites

Here’s a great demo from VMware showing off the capabilities of VMC on AWS. And if you’re interested to get a taste of VMC on AWS Outposts, click here to apply to the beta program.

Wrapping up

In a near future, customers will have the choice to run their VMC on AWS infrastructure either on the public cloud or on premise. I personally believe that this is a great deal for customers willing to keep their workloads on premise and as the same time benefit of the flexibility of the public cloud. And it won’t be a surprise to see such offering in the future with other public cloud providers such as Azure of GCP. Well, we’ll see soon enough, or not.