VMware Aria, which consists of VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store technology within VMware Aria Hub, allows for effective management of the entire multi-cloud environment.

SAN FRANCISCO – At the VMware Explore event here, VMware announced a new multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which seems to have been the new offering that generated the most excitement among VMware executives themselves. Designed expressly for cloud-native operations, Aria is powered by the  VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store technology, and is anchored by VMware Aria Hub, which was first unveiled last year as Project Ensemble, and which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment. Three existing offerings, vRealize, CloudHeath and Tanzu Observability, which provide a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications within Aria, have been rebranded within the Aria family and existing users will be ported over to the new offerings. Other new solutions were announced as well.

“We are super excited about this,” VMware CEO Raghu Raghuran announced from the stage in introducing Aria. Multicloud management is a huge problem today. At  VMware, we build a lot of multicloud SaaS applications, and we understand deeply the challenge of managing them in the cloud to a high level of resiliency and security.”

“We are jacked to announce Aria, a near real-time data solution integrated with Aria Hub and powered by Aria Graph to provide unified multi-cloud management,” said  DaShaun Carter, Staff Technologist, Spring Developer Advocate for VMware Tanzu. “VMware, Tanzu and Aria worked together to provide a uniform developer experience  here.”

VMware Aria’s graph data store and API services let it seamlessly integrate with third party solutions such as observability and application performance management tools. Data collected and normalized from native public clouds, on-prem clouds, VMware tools and third party tools within Aria Graph enriches operations, automation, and cost metrics in the products which until now have been known as VMware vRealize, CloudHealth by VMware and VMware Tanzu Observability.

“Aria Graph is the heart of this brand new multi-cloud solution,” Raghuran said. “It provides a graph of all of your cloud assets including Kubernetes and serverless. It can do all kinds of automation you couldn’t do before. This is at the heart of our muti-cloud management strategy and should be at the heart of yours.”

Raghuran emphasized how Aria Graph adds new federated capabilities to existing ones for working with this kind of data.

“We now have architecture which pulls data using public cloud APIs, where the data can reside in its local store and we can federate it,” he said. “That is one of the harder technical problems that we have solved. The federated capability does VMware data, but also third party data as well. We also use a confederated  confederated data model, with a graph maintained in real time, and GraphQL from Google.”

Aria Graph scales to hundreds of millions of nodes in cloud-native environments and captures the many-to-many relationships needed to fully understand dependencies. It captures change events whenever they happen, in full granularity, and that federated and modular architecture enables aggregation of data from any source. It all aligns operational data on a single, holistic source of truth, enabling teams to make better decisions and work more efficiently.

“Aria is about driving business solutions that meet this multi-cloud story,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, SVP and GM, Cloud Management Business at VMware. She noted that three new solutions, VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware Aria Operations, and VMware Aria Automation are rebrandings of CloudHealth, Tanzu Observatibility and vRealize.

“Their users will be entitled to the equivalent Aria new branding,” Padmanabhan said.

In addition, three new end-to-end management services built on top of VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph were also announced.

VMware Aria Automation Guardrails  automates enforcement of cloud guardrails for networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration at scale for multi-cloud environments with an everything-as-code approach.

VMware Aria Migration accelerates and simplifies the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution

VMware Aria Business Insights discerns relevant business insights from full-stack event correlation leveraging AI/ML analytics.