VMware and Amazon Web Services celebrated their third anniversary at VMworld this year since launching VMware Cloud on AWS. At that event in 2017, AWS CEO Andy Jassy joined VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger on stage to launch VMware Cloud on AWS, which Gelsinger called “the ultimate hybrid solution.”

And although VMware has since built hybrid cloud services with all of the major public cloud providers, AWS remains VMware’s No. 1 cloud partner, and the two companies have since added several new capabilities to the wildly popular service including, most recently, support for VMware’s Kubernetes-focused Tanzu portfolio.

While they’ve taken their relationship to the next level moving from the cloud and into the center together with AWS Outposts, will VMware and AWS extend this commitment to the edge?

Jassy announced a new edge computing infrastructure and service called AWS Wavelengths at last year’s AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas. But to date, neither company has said anything about AWS Wavelengths supporting VMware’s software stack.

“VMware hasn’t made any announcements about AWS Wavelengths,” said Mark Lohmeyer, SVP and GM of VMware’s Cloud Services Business Unit.

However, the hybrid cloud service VMware developed with AWS, along with its more recent VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, give the virtualization giant a strong edge computing and distributed cloud play, Lohmeyer added.

When he talks with customers about VMware Cloud on AWS, “one of the pieces of feedback we got was: I really like this as-a-service model, and why can’t I get VMware cloud delivered as a service on prem, either in a data center or in an edge environment or a local cloud? And one of the interesting things that we realized is that there’s nothing stopping us from doing that. We can enable that though the capabilities we built to deliver VMware Cloud as a service on AWS.”

At VMworld, the vendor announced new workload migration capabilities and support for multiple clusters within a single rack for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. “We’re delivering that same, core VMware infrastructure stack as a service, but we’re doing it on top of Dell server hardware,” Lohmeyer said, adding that edge and remote environments are a common use case for this cloud service.

“For example in manufacturing facilities, or in hospitals, or in the educational space, you’ve got a large number of distributed sites, and you want to have your applications running locally in each of those sites, but you might not have skilled IT professionals that you can send out to all those locations,” he said. “So having this be a fully managed service from VMware is quite attractive.”

Customers already run vSphere-based workloads in edge locations, Lohmeyer added. So having VMware manage these cloud services while also providing its storage and security capabilities “are all really strong value props we bring,” he said. “And then that flexibility for the future with Tanzu and the ability to modernize, so we’re in a very good position as the trend toward more distributed computing continues. It is an area we are invested in.”