Hello and welcome to this lecture covering some of the different use cases of VMware Cloud on AWS.

As I have already explained in a previous lecture, during its initial release, it's only available in the Oregon region. However, the plans are to make the service available in all regions throughout 2018. With this greater coverage will come greater interaction and connectivity between native VMware services and native AWS services. Let me now talk about some of the use cases of the service with the foresight of this service expanded throughout 2018 starting with application migration.

You might want to move applications to the cloud for a number of reasons which may include flexibility, agility, scale, cost efficiency, automation, high availability, risk mitigation, and redundancy to name but a few. With VMware Cloud on AWS, it enables you to utilize the advantages of the cloud architecture without having to re-architect or re-design your existing applications. They will continue to run across the same VM architecture that you already have configured with your new on-premises environment.

If you were to migrate your applications directly to the public cloud such as into the AWS Cloud itself, then you may have to perform configurational and architectural changes with your application for it to function correctly.In addition to migrating your VMs to run on EC2 instances, the whole process would involve a transformation project. The simplicity VMware Cloud on AWS provides to existing applications ensures seamless transitions of workloads between your SDDC and your on-premise environment.

Regional expansion. As your company grows and markets change, you might find that opportunities arise outside of your current scope of business which you may not be able to reach due to physical data center location, latency, and network capacity. VMware Cloud on AWS gives you the ability to have a presence across a wider geographic area even into different countries in different continents. This allows you to establish a local presence with new or existing customers enabling your business to gain advantage in changing markets. This all happens without having to host and manage a physical data center in that location.

Data center consolidation. With the ever increasing cost to run a data center, from an energy perspective alone along with the ongoing pressure put on organizations from governments to reduce their carbon footprint, the need to reduce the amount of data centers within an organization seems to be a growing trend across industries. By utilizing VMware Cloud on AWS, you can easily migrate your VMs to the cloud quickly, easily, securely, and consistently. As the service is made available in other regions, this will make it even easier if you currently have a global presence with your data centers. Server storage and network infrastructure form a significant footprint within your data centers so having the ability to move and migrate this to an SDDC drastically reduces the requirement put upon your local data centers.

Burst capacity. A common use case for any hybrid cloud connectivity is to manage burst traffic that may be experienced. Depending on your industry and organization, there may be certain times of the year where you're expecting to get a sudden burst of increased traffic. For example, you might be a large retailer and so leading up to Christmas you might experience higher than expected volumes of traffic or perhaps you run campaigns for the launch of new products about to take the world by storm, again you would be expecting large traffic spikes.

Traditionally, you would have to cater for this additional load by expanding your capacity on-premises to ensure you attain the right level of performance for your customers. You don't want to be in a situation where your website crashes due to insufficient resource capacity. Unfortunately, these resources would remain almost redundant throughout the rest of the year. This means that a huge amount of CAPEX will be spent to obtain this hardware for very infrequent use.

Instead of purchasing this additional hardware to handle the burst traffic, you could simply use a VMware cluster within your SDDC. As these resources peak, you can then scale up your cluster size to suit the demand. When the burst traffic has subsided, you can then reduce your cluster size or even remove it altogether, therefore saving you a considerable amount of cost whilst at the same time providing reliable service to manage the traffic resulting in a stable and positive customer experience.

Test and development workloads: The use case here is similar to the previous point in that you may not have the capacity within your data center or from a financial perspective to host additional servers and storage for test and dev purposes. Scaling out to VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to create an SDDC with compute, storage, and network elements to perform your test and development routines.

These clusters can be scaled in and out as and when you need them and you only pay for these hosts when they're active in your account. Therefore, when you no longer need to perform testing or development, you can remove your clusters altogether and stop paying for the environment or reduce the host capacity back to the minimum cluster size.

There will be many use cases for this service, many of which may be specific to your organization. The main point is that VMware Cloud on AWS combines the virtualization technology of a leading private cloud vendor, VMware, and combines it with the services and features that a leading public cloud vendor, AWS, can provide. With this combination, you'll be sure to find a use case that works for you.

That now brings me to the end of this lecture. Coming up next, I want to discuss the pricing model used for the service.