The recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has created a stir within the IT industry. Beginning November 2023, when the $69 billion acquisition was completed, VMware signalled significant changes to their licensing model by bundling previously standalone products together and changing their perpetual licensing model. A survey commissioned by AWS and Cloudbolt shows the general consensus is that these sweeping changes to licensing terms could increase the cost of VMware licensing for some organizations by 500 to 600%.
At the same time, the cost of IT infrastructure is a common concern for most businesses. A study done by IDC reveals that preventing future capital expenditure and reducing IT infrastructure costs were common business drivers for migrating to AWS. The same study shows that customers who move to AWS can experience up to 51% cost savings, making the option to migrate to AWS even more compelling.
Additionally, Broadcom announced that on the 30th of April 2024, they will no longer permit AWS to sell VMware Cloud. Combined with the likely increase in VMware licensing for customers running on-premises infrastructure, this presents an interesting challenge for customers who may have looked to VMware Cloud as a low-effort method for migrating to AWS and thus avoiding capital expenditure on ageing hardware.
Fortunately, every challenge presents an opportunity. While the path to migration may not seem so straightforward given the fact VMware on Cloud is no longer an option, the AWS MAP (Migration Acceleration Program) is a well-established path for helping customers move to AWS while helping to keep their migration costs low and streamline the process.
Modernization Opportunities with AWS
When combined with a programmatic approach to modernization, customers who undertake such a project can realize significant benefits. Additionally, migrating to AWS opens up a number of opportunities for modernization, such as adopting cloud-native managed databases, serverless, and cloud-native architectures, to name a few. In many cases, customers can realize up to a 39% decrease in infrastructure spend when moving workloads to serverless. Of course, there are other benefits to modernization, such as increased scalability and reliability.
So, what should customers looking for alternatives to VMware do? Undertaking a migration to the cloud is a complex exercise requiring careful planning and a solid business case. On top of all this, some decisions made in the early stage of migration planning can have long-lasting effects. For example, a lift-and-shift is an easy option for completing a migration quickly; however, realizing the benefits of the cloud are often the casualty of such an approach.
Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence
It’s important to begin with establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence. The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework is a good place to start when looking for a guidebook on this process as it walks you through the fundamentals, aligning with the business and bringing it along for the journey to the cloud.
Identifying Key Stakeholders and Champions
Doing so helps to ensure you have alignment with the business across the key pillars of the CAF framework. Organizations that skip this step can still succeed in the short term, but it’s not uncommon for the long-term results to not match expectations.
Performing a Full Inventory of IT Estate
This includes your virtual and physical machines, operating systems, licensed software, dependencies, and current performance metrics. This may seem like a complex task. Fortunately, there is software that can help. Gaining a grasp on your existing IT estate helps to create accurate cost forecasts, identify opportunities to right-size your virtual machines, and plan out modernization efforts. AWS’s Optimization and License Assessment (OLA) is a funded program aimed at helping organizations do just that.
Establishing a Baseline of Metrics
Understand key data points such as existing infrastructure costs and TCO, which includes operational efficiency and agility. Tracking these trends over time as you migrate and modernize helps to demonstrate back to the business their return on investment and provides a basis for future investments.
Adopting Modern Ways of Working
Adopt modern ways of working, such as DevOps methodologies. Frequently, customers who migrate to the cloud bring their existing ways of working. Just like the CCoE, skipping this step often delivers results in the short term but begins to show lackluster results in the long term. Traditional ways of working on cloud infrastructure limit your ability to adopt modernized architectures, hinder agility, and ultimately drive costs up. It also affects an organization’s ability to properly govern the cloud, leading to challenges with security and compliance. DevOps methodologies combined with Infrastructure as Code allow you to embed your security and compliance policies in code, ensuring complete coverage. The ability to spin up infrastructure enables workload teams to innovate faster, simplifies disaster recovery, and business continuity plans.
Demonstrating Early Wins
Customers who can demonstrate a small number of early wins typically have more success in the long run. During the planning stage, identify a number of workloads of various sizes and complexity that can be migrated during the pilot stage. These early exercises will provide learnings that can be fed back into the process for improvement and will help things go smoother when you begin to scale the migration phase. By tracking key metrics, it also helps to demonstrate to the business and workload owners the value of such a project.
While it’s tempting to take a lift-and-shift approach for everything, the big wins will be realized in modernizing applications. This doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach, and it doesn’t necessarily require a full rewrite of your applications. Consider containerizing your applications or moving to managed databases. AWS provides tools such as Babelfish, which can help reduce the amount of effort in swapping out SQL Server for Aurora PostgreSQL.
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has shaken things up for many businesses. The sudden ending of VMware on Cloud has caused businesses intending to use it as a low-effort migration to the cloud to quickly adjust their plans. Other businesses may look to move to the cloud sooner in an attempt to avoid additional costs incurred by the new VMware licensing terms. For these businesses, the justification to migrate to AWS becomes easier.
AWS Funded Programs: MAP and OLA
In either case, funded programs from AWS such as MAP and OLA provide a tried-and-true roadmap for large-scale migrations and data centre exits. The AWS Migration Acceleration Program breaks down migrations into three main stages: Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate & Modernize. Typically, customers who migrate with MAP realize higher cost savings and migrate around 80% faster than those who migrate without it.
The Optimization and Licence Assessment, another funded program by AWS, provides customers with a complete and comprehensive report that breaks down the expected costs of running their infrastructure on AWS and takes into account the existing performance metrics and licensing, giving customers a complete view of how to optimize their infrastructure and licences while migrating to AWS.
Both these programs can be delivered by a trusted AWS partner such as Devoteam.
