VMware Inc. and Amazon Web Service’s partnership has continued to solidify after providing joint solutions for more than four years.

Their collaboration and co-engineering are providing an easy, fast and cost-efficient path toward the hybrid cloud, according to Matthew Morgan (pictured left), vice president of the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware. It also allows their customers to innovate, improve applications, and obtain a quicker time-to-market. Today, VMware Cloud on AWS is one of AWS’ preferred services for all vSphere workloads.

“The public cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations, and that’s because they have so many benefits when they embrace the public cloud, including the ability to elastically consume infrastructure, employ a pay-as-you-go financial model, and reduce operational overhead,” Morgan said. “But the big driver now is the ability to embrace innovative cloud services, and those services help accelerate application development, deployment and management. VMware Cloud on AWS is a prime example of such an offering.”

Morgan and Steven Jones (pictured right), director of EC2 services at AWS, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during last month’s theCUBE on VMworld event. They discussed the evolution of the VMware and AWS partnership, VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS Outposts. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Talk to us about the VMware-AWS partnership and how it has progressed. 

Morgan: We announced VMware Cloud on AWS general availability all the way back at VMworld 2017. In 2019, we expanded our go-to-market by announcing a resale program in which AWS can resell VMware Cloud on AWS. And in 2020, we announced that AWS is VMware’s preferred public cloud partner for vSphere-based workloads.

Jones: As Matt indicated, VMware is our preferred service for vSphere-based workloads, and we’re broadly working together as a single team across both engineering and go-to-market functions to help customers drive business value from the investments they made over the years. 

Steven, talk to me about some of the trends you’re seeing in organizations like the customers that you just mentioned.  

Jones: A lot of customers want to leverage the same cloud operating models but in their own data centers so they can take advantage of the agility and innovation of the cloud while also meeting requirements that they sometimes have to keep them from adopting the cloud. You can think of workloads that sometimes have low latency requirements or they need to process large volumes of data locally. At other times, customers tell us they need the flexibility to run data workloads in a particular area that has data sovereignty or residency requirements.

Matt, you have some breaking news to share. What is it? 

Morgan: We’re announcing the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. For customers looking to extend their AWS-centric model to an on-premises location — that data center or edge location — VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts delivers the agility and innovation of AWS cloud but on-premises. And VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is based on VMware Cloud, a jointly engineered service. So, together we’re delivering this service on-premises as a service. This gives you the capability to integrate VMware’s enterprise-class architecture and platform with next-generation, dedicated Amazon Nitro-based EC2 bare metal instances.

It provides a deeply integrated hybrid cloud operating environment that extends from a customer’s data center to these particular services running on-premises in the data center, the edge or to the public cloud and having a unified control plane between all of it. 

Steven, AWS Outposts was announced at re:Invent 2019. So, coming up on a couple of years here. Talk to me about some of the key use cases where you’re seeing that really excel. 

Jones: With Outposts, we actually leverage the same hardware and control plane technology that we have leveraged in our own data centers. So what the customers have come to know, love and expect about the AWS platform and VMC on AWS is the exact same thing that we’ll be able to get with the Outposts technology. 

One of our higher education customers today, who has migrated workloads to be in more clouds on AWS, is looking at extending the same capability to an on-premises experience, specifically for school applications that require a low latency integration from a local data processing perspective. And one of our VMware on AWS top biopharmaceutical companies, here in the U.S., is planning to use VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts for health management applications and patient records that need to be retained locally at the hospital sites. 

And then finally, going back to the story around data residency, we have a large telecom provider in Europe that is planning to use this particular offering for their applications that need to remain on-premises to meet regulatory requirements.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE on VMworld event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for theCUBE on VMworld event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE