VMware updated its cloud management platform, adding, among other things, new automation capabilities.

“The big driving force is helping our customers manage and operate their hybrid cloud environments,” said Taruna Gandhi, director of product marketing for VMware's cloud management business unit.

For now, that hybrid cloud environment support in vRealize Operations is limited to vSphere-based private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Amazon Web Services’ public cloud. But Microsoft Azure support is “very near,” Gandhi added.

If we had to bet on how near, we’d put our money on VMworld in August.

VRealize Automation provides Microsoft Azure support today.

The new product releases span the vRealize suite of cloud management products. They include what the company calls a “self-driving” approach to monitoring and managing data centers and cloud environments.

“What’s new is using this idea of intent — a user defines their intent — for continuous workload performance optimization as well as integration between vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations.

On the vRealize Operations side, this includes a new capacity analytics engine and performance automation based on intent. The capacity analytics engine capabilities include cost and analytics. It can automate reclamation of unused resources and right-sizing environments. It can also run “what-if” scenarios to plan for future projects, taking cost and capacity into account, across vSphere-based private clouds, AWS, and VMware Cloud on AWS.

The new intent-based capabilities work with vSphere-based private clouds (they’ll also work with VMware Cloud on AWS in the future). Intent includes operational and business intent, Gandhi said.

“It could be operational intent, as in I need a certain amount of capacity for business critical apps, or I need to save costs,” she explained. “Or it could be business intent around reducing my software license costs or meeting performance SLAs [service level agreements].”

The software uses predictive analytics and automated workload balancing to match the workloads with the intent.

The new vRealize Operations release also is integrated with Wavefront technology from VMware’s April 2017 acquisition of the application monitoring startup. It allows DevOps teams to monitor apps such as Cassandra, Kafka, and Redis, along with traditional apps.

Additionally, vRealize Automation updates include more than 120 free, curated blueprints and open virtualization files for applications and databases such as GitLab, Hadoop, Jenkins, and MongoDB.