vRealize Automation Cloud Launch Update – September 2021 – Cloud Blog – VMware

Welcome to vRealize Automation Cloud, September Launch!

While maintaining our multi-cloud momentum, in September, we are doubling down on Kubernetes Automation with CI workspace integration and several enhancements in our extensibility capabilities for ABX (action-based extensibility) and vRealize Orchestrator. Read through!

Custom ABX Resources and Extensibility

We refer to “extensibility” as the ability to extend to systems and processes that are not supported readily out-of-the-box. Almost all enterprises today use the same four or five cloud vendors for most of their cloud needs. At the same time, every enterprise cloud ecosystem is unique like a snowflake. That is why vRealize Automation embraces a two-prone strategy: Deep, up-to-date support for common, core elements and flexible extensibility frameworks to address specificities and ingest anything as a custom resource. Until today, vRealize Orchestrator XaaS (anything-as-a-service) custom resources and the Terraform service in vRealize Automation could be used to complement the natively supported resources within VMware Cloud Templates.

With this release, you can also leverage serverless Action-Based Extensibility (ABX) to create custom resources and actions without leaving your public cloud of choice. ABX is a modern FaaS-based framework that uses common scripting and programming languages to tie actions with events. With this release we bring the power of ABX on the Infrastructure-as-Code interfaces as custom resources that can be included in VMware Cloud Templates and reused. ABX, being very lightweight, lives both in our supported public clouds and on-prem, making it the ideal custom resource framework for custom public cloud resources.

However, we haven’t stopped enhancing the vRealize Orchestrator integration. In fact, we just brought dynamic vRealize Orchestrator inputs in the cloud templates.

Kubernetes CI Support in Code Stream Pipelines

Our pipeline component, VMware Code Stream, now supports Kubernetes for continuous integration tasks, in addition to Docker. Kubernetes manages the entire lifecycle of the container, similar to Docker. Kubernetes can be used as the pipeline workspace enabling builder image to use Image registry, namespace, node port, persistent volume claim, working directory, environment variables, CPU and memory limit.

As Kubernetes becomes the standard for container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines have emerged as the most DevOps-friendly approach to manage such workloads across the different development and release stages while maintaining streamlined independence. Code Stream provides an intuitive low-code interface (parallel GUI and scripting) to enable seamless collaboration between the platform operators and the developers.

VMware or Native Multi-Cloud? Both

Continuing the drumroll from previous months, we have added a few more improvements on our native support for Microsoft Azure. Specifically, you can configure the name of NIC for a VM running on Azure leveraging a new API and enable or disable log analytics for Azure VMs on an ongoing basis, upon or after initial provisioning.

Moreover, we have made security groups assignment and management in VMware Cloud on AWS environments more flexible and dynamic with the use of tags.

Other Improvements 

As usual, there are several more features that were added or improved this month:

vSphere network onboarding: You can onboard vSphere network objects along with the VMs while executing an onboarding plan. Automating the operations of brownfield environments can be much harder than greenfield automation. Bringing the respective networks along with their machines is a much-anticipated capability that makes lifecycle management of existing workloads much faster, easier and more scalable.

New “Project Supervisor” role for approvals: This release introduces a new out-of-the-box role called “Project Supervisor” which can be used for approving deployment requests. Any user with this role can serve as an approver only for that specific project.

Get Started for Free!

With all this and many more coming, it is a good time to experience hands-on the latest and greatest innovation in VMware’s automation solution!

Our free 45-day trial is the best way to explore vRealize Automation Cloud yourself or with a little help from our experts.

Until next month!