VMware announced that its joint offering with Amazon Web Services is expanding to a second cloud infrastructure region, providing customers with additional geographic availability and access to new services.
Businesses can deploy applications through the VMware Cloud on AWS service in the cloud provider’s West Virginia datacenter, in addition to existing support offered for AWS’ Oregon region. That geographic expansion makes it easier for businesses to choose a nearby location, or one that matches up with the current location of their existing public cloud investments.
The service gives companies a full version of VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) stack running on top of AWS’ cloud hardware so it is easier for them to migrate applications to the public cloud from private infrastructure.
Applications that rely on technology like VMware’s vSphere software will be able to get access to those same tools in the cloud, while also providing easier access to AWS’ suite of first-party services that run in its public cloud datacenters.
The news comes as part of AWS’ re:Invent conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Just a week ago, Microsoft announced that it would be jumping into the same market with a competing service that was designed to allow customers with VMware workloads to run them on its cloud infrastructure.
These services are designed to drive cloud adoption by making it easier for businesses to take existing applications that are currently running in private datacenters and migrate them to the public cloud without much, if any, modification. While many companies are looking to move to the public cloud eventually, that transition seems uneven and messy at the moment, so streamlining matters could help drive significant business.
This isn’t the end of VMware’s geographic expansion plans. The company also plans to build out its service in other countries in order to help comply with data residency laws and provide lower latencies for customers outside the U.S.
The expansion comes a few months after VMware Cloud on AWS was made generally available and roughly a year after it was unveiled to the world during a private press briefing with the CEOs of both firms.
