Migrate to Cloud-Native Services

As an organization transitions to a VMware Cloud-based SDDC, they should assess and evaluate the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure service options including their SLAs. An assessment must be made of an organization’s on-premises infrastructure services based on criteria such as manageability, availability, and total cost of ownership (TCO) which outweighs the benefits of a managed cloud-native service.

Automation and Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) are generally first-class citizens for cloud-native infrastructure services. This enables an organization to leverage modern automation and "infrastructure as code" tools to create and request new cloud resources in a much shorter period of time. This can possibly take weeks or months to build in traditional data centers. The combination of VMware Cloud and the ability to automate cloud-native infrastructure services can deliver a true Software-Defined Datacenter.

Another benefit to cloud-native infrastructure services is the level of availability that is offered, health monitoring, and scalability as a managed service. For undifferentiated infrastructure services, organizations can leverage cloud-native infrastructure services, which are priced based on consumption. It is important to have understand the utilization of existing infrastructure services before migrating them to a cloud-native service. Most infrastructure services providers offer tools to help predict the estimated cost of consuming their services. To proactively monitor and prevent unexpected costs, billing alerts and notifications should be configured.

Multi-Cloud can also present a unique challenge when determining an organization’s strategy for consuming infrastructure services. For example, if an organization plans to extend their existing on-premises infrastructure services to multiple infrastructure service providers, different types of connectivity must be configured and managed, which can bring additional complexities from an operational standpoint. In contrast, organizations may consume cloud-native infrastructure services from individual infrastructure service providers, which can also bring its own complexity as each solution will require unique skillsets to configure and manage.