VMware is introducing major updates and new solutions across its cloud management product portfolio this week at VMworld 2014 Europe in Barcelona.
To help IT organizations extend the agility provided by continuous integration into continuous delivery, VMware also unveiled a major update of VMware vRealize Operations (formerly VMware vCenterOperations Management Suite. The new VMware vRealize Code Stream enables DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases.
According to Christian Paulus, director, product marketing, Cloud Automation, at VMware, the year 2013 was a pivotal one for most businesses, representing a point at which they switched back from cost-saving and cost-cutting mode into a more forward-thinking approach to accelerate growth and make inroads into new markets. “This has an impact on how IT operates,” said Paulus, observing that as a business is trying to grow it becomes more important than ever to be agile and go after new market opportunities. This in turn puts pressure on application organizations to provide applications faster or perhaps shorten the release cycles. At the same time, for the infrastructure and operations teams, it means that they have to provide infrastructure faster to the application organizations.
“It is kind of a chain, going down from the business to applications to IT and if this doesn’t really quite work, then in the end the business really can’t capitalize on those new market opportunities,” said Paulus.
According to Paulus, vRealize Automation, which is part of the vRealize Suite helps businesses to provide more agility for infrastructure organizations and then move up to the application stack but with vRealize Code Stream, VMware is also providing a new product offering which is specifically targeted at applications organizations.
“This is a standalone product that can be run on the vRealize Suite, but it can also run independently on software from Puppet or Chef or SaltStack - or other very lightweight configuration and deployment engines,” said Paulus.
In the last few years, most development organizations have moved to agile development processes and continuous integration where they try to keep the software working at all times, but while this makes the development process much faster, the rest of the release process stayed manual and slow with concerns about risk and unplanned downtime.
“Now, with Code Stream we actually provide a product for DevOps organizations with a capability specifically around continuous delivery, which is the part of the process where you pick up from development and then you automate the process across test, UAT, and production at the different stages until production.” Now, he said, Code Stream extends agility that continuous integration provides in the development part of the process, and extending agility into continuous delivery to push applications and changes more quickly into production.
VMware has also announced VMware vRealize Suite 6 a cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud, and the beta launch of VMware vRealize Air Compliance, a new addition to VMware's family of cloud management software as a service (SaaS) offerings that is intended to help organizations keep their vSphere-based infrastructure in compliance with regulatory mandates, industry requirements, and business policies.
More information about the vRealize Suite is available at www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-suite.