News

AWS, VMware Strengthen Ties with Upcoming Amazon RDS on VMware

• By David Ramel
• 09/06/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) and virtualization specialist VMware have increased their cooperative ties with the announcement of the upcoming Amazon RDS on VMware.

Earlier, we reported how VMware announced several enhancements to its VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid offering, which first went live a year ago, at the company's VMworld conference.

Those multiple VMware Cloud on AWS enhancements were followed up by AWS unveiling Amazon RDS on VMware, expected to become available in the coming months.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed relational database service that works on six popular database engines. AWS says it enables the setup, operation and scaling of a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks.

Now, AWS says that database functionality can be transferred to VMware-based software-defined data centers and hybrid environments, along with the ability to migrate them to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS.

"Amazon RDS on VMware automates database management regardless of where the database is deployed, freeing up customers to focus on developing and tuning their applications," AWS said in a statement. The company said the new offering will be available in the coming months, supporting Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB databases.

In a follow-up blog post, AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr provided more details. Here's his summation:

• Architecture -- A vSphere environment is effectively a private, local AWS Availability Zone (AZ), connected to AWS across a VPN tunnel running over the Internet or a AWS Direct Connect connection. Users will be able to create Multi-AZ instances of RDS that span vSphere clusters.
• Backups -- Backups can make use of local (on-premises storage) or AWS, and are subject to both local and AWS retention policies. Backups are portable, and can be used to create an in-cloud Amazon RDS instance. Point in Time Recovery (PITR) will be supported, as long as users restore to the same environment.
• Management -- Users will be able to manage Amazon RDS on vSphere instances from the Amazon RDS Console and from vCenter. Also, they will be able to use the Amazon RDS CLI and the Amazon RDS APIs.
• Regions – AWS will launch in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions, with more to come over time.

Enterprises interested in getting their hands on the new offering ASAP can register for the preview.