Amazon RDS on VMware

 If you’re not familiar with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), you can trust me that it is a tried, tested and much loved service available within AWS, helping DBAs by simplifying the use of MariaDB, SQL, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.  Being an AWS offering, RDS comes with all of the features that you would expect from a public cloud service such as HA, scalability for that burst capacity, resilience and management ease.

It is no secret that VMware and AWS have a strategic partnership, with VMware’s VMConAWS proposition (see my previous blog posts), aimed at helping customers to move to the public cloud more easily, extending tools and leveraging existing on premise investments to accelerate the initial first step to a hyper-scaled public cloud, giving you the ability to migrate workloads to the cloud by using vmotion or familiar tools seen in our datacenters today.   Tools and procedures that are familiar to admins, that retain monitoring, automation, network and security policies then to greatly help customers with lift and shift migrations.

Announced at VMworld Las Vegas in August 2018 by VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger and AWS CEO Andy Cassidy, is a further sign that VMware and AWS wish to strengthen that strategic partnership, with the announcement of RDS on VMware!  That’s right, an AWS Public Cloud Service, that you can run on your on premise, Enterprise Private Cloud, or the public cloud, or both!

Great, fantastic, but what does this actually mean?  Quite a bit actually.  For starters, Databases have been somewhat of a sticky area for the public cloud, often requiring huge resources with licence cost implications that make Database migrations cost prohibitive in some cases, not to mention the complexity involved.  RDS on VMware paves the way for an easy transition for AWS and VMware customers to move databases to the public cloud.

You are now able to spin up an RDS managed DB on premise or in the cloud, create backups on either and have read replicas running on either, within minutes.  This is done by making use of direct connects or VPNs between AWS and your private cloud, creating an AWS Availability zone (AZ) or multiple AZs for multiple RDS instances on premise.

Backups can now use local storage, vSAN, 3PAR etc or backup to AWS, meaning you can restore databases to either environment.  You can manage your RDS instances from the AWS RDS console OR the vSphere Console, so once again demonstrating that VMware and AWS are not merely running on top of each other.  There is a deeper level of integration of the products to ensure a seamless integration, similar to that seen with VMConAWS.

If you would like to know more see here: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/vmware/