Salt Stack Config meets vRealize Automation Cloud – 05.21 Launch Update – VMware Cloud Community

Welcome to your monthly Automation digest!

This May, we introduced several important features in vRealize Automation Cloud. However, this month’s launch pinnacle is SaltStack Config becoming available as-a-service for the first time!

Salt up your Cloud

We’re excited to announce that vRealize Automation Cloud customers can now get access to a hosted version of SaltStack Config, the powerful configuration management component for vRealize Automation. Powered by the open source Salt Project, vRealize Automation SaltStack Config provides fast, declarative state management to ensure your systems are configured properly on day 0—and auto drift remediation to keep them that way on day 2 and beyond. vRealize Automation Cloud customers can start using a hosted version of SaltStack  by submitting a support ticket. To learn more about the capabilities of SaltStack Config, visit https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-automation/saltstack-config.htm

High Resolution Governance and Quotas

vRealize Automation Cloud shines in cloud organization and governance and this launch does not disappoint in this area. Setting up resource quotas allows for flexible consumption control for number of VMs, CPU, memory and storage at the project or user level. Being able to budget cloud consumption is a common yet critical use case for all sizes of organizations. Along with, approvals, leases and access for day 2 actions, resource quotas provide the granular controls to finetune who, how and for how long can consume your precious cloud resources. Furthermore, resource policies apply consistently across VMware Clouds, on-premises or hosted, and hyperscaler clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) making multi-cloud governance a walk in the park! Learn all about resource quotas in this blog.
Additionally, a wealth of new policy criteria that can be used for any policy type enable flexible and precise policy definition. Attributes such as, cloud zones, CPU count, image, OS type, power state can now be included in policy expressions. Finally the ability to scope a policy to multiple projects allow for governance at scale for larger cloud enterprises.

Resource center for granular visibility and management

In vRealize Automation Cloud, many of the activities happen at the “deployment” level, a workload abstraction, that typically includes several resources combining into a topology that gets deployed together. It is quite common though, that cloud operators want to get a level deeper – at the resource level. With the new resource center view, vRealize Automation provides a complete view of managed resources and the ability to perform lifecycle management actions directly from that view. Read this blog to learn more about it.

More..

So many features, so little room. This May we are also introducing certified support for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, concurrent day 2 actions, property groups with RBAC and cloud template association for better usability along with a few enhancements on Microsoft Azure integrations with the ability to configure boot diagnostics and log analytics. Take a look at our release notes for a complete list.

Learn CICD with Code Stream

A new developer-focused portal, LearnCodeStream, for our CI/CD pipeline, Code Stream has just become available. Tutorials, best practices, tips and tricks are some of the things you will find in LearnCodeStream. Contribution is highly encouraged: Each page has a link to it’s source in the GitHub repository, so if you spot something that’s incorrect, or you have something to add, feel free to jump in and edit the Markdown and issue a Pull Request!

Our Code Stream guru, Sam McGeown (@sammcgeown), has recently been busy building around and writing about Code Stream.  After developing a CLI for Code Stream, about a month ago, he has also written a couple of insightful blogs on Kubernetes Automation for Helm Charts via Code stream and integrating Tanzu Mission control with our Custom Resource framework. Take the time to read them!

Last but not least, don’t miss our webinar on May 26^th 11AM PT/ 6PM GMT. We will discuss how modern VI and cloud admins start embedding their critical testing and quality assurance processes earlier in the development cycle by “Shifting Operations Left with vRealize Automation”

Until next month!