SAN FRANCISCO – VMware introduced a new multicloud management suite to manage cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of cloud native apps end-to-end at the vendor's Explore 2022 event.

The VMware Aria portfolio, first announced as Project Ensemble at VMworld 2021, is powered by graph-based data store technology and focuses on three main categories of multicloud management: cost, operations, and automation. These are anchored by the vendor's Aria Hub where enterprises can centrally view and control multicloud environments.

“In a nutshell, what VMware Aria is, is a powerful new solution powered by Aria Hub and Aria Graph that also brings together all of the existing VMware solutions like CloudHealth, vRealize, and Tanzu Application Portfolio with an integrated capability,” Purnima Padmanabhan, VMware SVP and GM of Cloud Management, said during a press briefing.

“We've taken all these complex disciplines and brought them together and integrated them to align to customer outcomes such as cost, performance, security, config, and delivery automation. And that is what we call VMware Aria Cost, Aria Operations, and Aria Automation, and all of these are powered by a central platform called VMware Aria Hub,” Padmanabhan explained.

Aria Cost is focused on “delivering comprehensive cost with usability, but also allowing for optimization and governance of cost. Aria Operations is to provide full stack visibility of your environment so that your application performance can always be maintained, and Aria Automation speeds up the delivery of applications to environment and allows you to securely manage the configurations across environments,” she explained.

The key to this Aria ecosystem is the Aria Graph, which “brings together all this information and allows us to stitch together a combined solution,” Padmanabhan said.

The hub uses Aria Graph to commonly define applications, resources, roles, and accounts. The data store captures resources and relationships across multicloud environments and provides updates in real-time. Aria Graph, which was built specifically for cloud native operations, outpaces other solutions on the market for this reason, according to the company.

“As you think about multicloud, there are many different clouds, many different cloud objects, and many different relationships. Modeling all of them is hard. These are fast moving, changing by every millisecond,” and “each of these objects have different APIs and different data sets. Your API for extracting cost, or performance, or security information could be completely different. And that's where the power of Aria Graph comes in,” she explained.

While VMware touts Aria Graph as a data store for multicloud that manages the relationships of millions of objects, it's not just about scale. “It is about being able to capture the near-real-time nature of the change that is happening with event-based approaches,” Padmanabhan said.

VMware also claims Aria Graph's API services allow it to “seamlessly integrate” with third-party tools for observability or application performance management. The tool's data collection and normalization from public or on-prem clouds fills the gap of application-aware management for private, hybrid, and native public clouds, according to the company.

“The best part is Aria Graph has a public API,” she touted. It uses a GraphQL model to gives developers immediate access to information about their applications, how applications are configured, and application dependencies.

“How much do they cost? How are they performing? How are they configured? Are they configured secure[ly]? All this information through a single, central API, irrespective of which product is feeding that information,” she said.

Existing VMware cloud management customers are entitled to an equivalent Aria offering, all of which include access to Aria Hub and Aria Graph.

Read all of SDxCentral’s VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.