Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy joined VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger on stage at last month’s VMworld conference to announce Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on VMware. This new service, which will debut in upcoming months, will allow customers to deploy the public cloud-native database in their on-premises VMware-based data centers.

“You’ll be able to provision databases, scale compute, storage, and memory for those databases, deploy in high-availability configurations by replicating to different VMware clusters,” Jassy said.

It’s a big deal. By deploying its proprietary database software on premises, the public cloud giant gains a foothold in enterprises’ data centers. It also signals that AWS (and other cloud providers) do believe hybrid cloud is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.

At today’s Deutsche Bank Technology Conference in Las Vegas, Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware’s COO for products and cloud services, told investors that the virtualization company isn’t stopping with Amazon RDS on VMware. In fact, the company wants to bring more cloud-native services into its customers’ on-premises data centers.

“We hope multiple cloud providers’ services, starting with AWS, can be made available on prem,” he said. This differentiates the VMware-AWS partnership from Microsoft’s Azure and Azure Stack public and hybrid cloud offerings, he added: “We aim to provide a much more flexible set of services that aren’t necessarily tied to the infrastructure of the stack.”

So why start with a database service? It’s what customers wanted, Ramaswami said.

“This is among the top critical services that they want to run on premises,” he said. “Database services, in general, came out on top. And more to come. Hopefully this will be the first of many [cloud services running on premises].”

This is part of VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy, which essentially boils down to enabling enterprises to run the same software stack in their VMware-based private clouds and in public clouds like AWS, IBM, or any of its other 4,000 cloud provider partners.

VMware’s public cloud strategy

Ramaswami also provided more details about VMware’s public cloud strategy. Its CloudHealth acquisition, also announced at VMworld, will play a starring role in this one.

Some companies don’t use VMware’s stack, he acknowledged. Instead, they prefer public cloud-native capabilities. “Here there’s no vSphere,” he said. “However, there’s a strong need for these enterprises to do cost analytics, compliance, and security for these public-cloud environments.”

This is where CloudHealth fits in. It provides a cloud operations platform and provides cost management and analytics across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. And it has more than 3,000 customers including Yelp, Dow Jones, Zendesk, Skyscanner, and SHI.

“With CloudHealth, our rationale is that it provides us that framework and foundation to go build a full set of services to provide management, operations, security, compliance, cost management, across all of these public clouds,” Ramaswami said.