At the keynote of day 2 of VMworld Europe 2017 some time was reserved to present the Elastic Sky Pizza business case. This business case was also presented at VMworld US two weeks ago, for a transcript of the case (and keynote) check Scott Lowe’s blogpost here.
The Elastic Sky Pizza case was used to discuss what is provided by VMware cloud services. One of the new services that was discussed and is currently in tech preview, is VM Automation. Because automation is one of topics I closely follow (and I’m working with on a daily basis), I will include some screenshots of VM Automation in this post, and discuss them.
The VM Automation solution clearly leverages VMware’s project Clarity. Project Clarity is an open source design system, and is used in more and more management interfaces of VMware products.
A first screenshot of VM Automation shows the catalog, that includes different services. Services based on VMware Pivotal Containers Service, CI/CD pipeline definitions and an AWS Social App.
After a successful request, a “deployment” appears in the interface. A deployment consists of one or more virtual machines, information on IP addressing, date/time of the deployment, etc.
Items in the catalog are designed leveraging the following interface:
I think this one looks pretty awesome. As you can see, on the left we have the building blocks available that you can use in your blueprint. General building blocks such as Compute, Network, Storage and Load balancer are available as well as software components. In the middle we see the design canvas and on the right the infrastructure as code part.
What was told is that blueprints can be deployed on each available (and connected) environment/cloud in the VM Automation cloud service. Blueprints are truly independent from the underlying cloud/infrastructure.
In this last screenshot we see the marketplace (accessible through marketplace.vmware.com) seamlessly integrated in VM Automation. This makes it very easy to create new services in VM Automation based on content that is available in the marketplace.
I think VM Automation looks great, and I personally like the Clarity interface. No information was provided when VM Automation will be available, so all we can do is just sit and wait…
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