At VMworld US, Amazon AWS announced its intention to offer a version of its RDS managed database service for VMware private cloud environments. The objective is to enable the implementation of hybrid architectures by companies, but also eventually the migration to AWS.

Since last year, VMware has been marketing a public cloud service, VMware on AWS, hosted on the cloud giant’s infrastructure. The goal is to give companies a counterpoint to the publisher’s private cloud offer to offer them homogeneous hybrid cloud services. To build this offer, VMware relied on bare machines provided by AWS.

But this year, it was AWS that announced its intention to use VMware technologies to implement its database solution as a Service RDS (Relational Database Service) in an “on premises” version. RDS should thus become AWS’ first genuinely hybrid infrastructure service (the provider already offers an on-premise extension of its public service IoT Greengrass).

AWS RDS: facilitate the deployment and management of databases

Amazon Relational Database Service is Amazon Web Services’ managed SQL database offering. It supports a wide range of database engines including MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Amazon’s own SQL database, Aurora. RDS ensures automated provisioning of database instances and incorporates sophisticated replication, migration and backup mechanisms.

The technology also makes it possible to organize the replication (synchronous and asynchronous) of databases and can orchestrate the automatic switchover between several availability zones in the event of failure. It controls all RDS functions via the AWS management console, Amazon RDS APIs or the cloud provider’s command line interface.

Speaking on stage at the opening keynote of VMworld, Andy Jassy, Amazon AWS CEO explained that RDS on VMware would offer on VMware on-premise clusters, the same service as RDS on AWS (except for in-house DBMS support, Aurora).

Amazon will propose a pre-version of the service in the coming months. Jassy didn’t specify what the prerequisites will be to make it work, nor did he determine how we would administer the future RDS on VMware. He just indicated that the replication mechanism implemented by AWS in the cloud would have an equivalent on-premise since it will be possible to replicate databases between VMware clusters.

Towards an opening of AWS technologies to on-premises?

The RDS offer on VMware breaks with Amazon’s important policy of offering its technologies only on its public cloud. It could signal the supplier’s desire to deploy its solutions more widely in hybrid mode.

By partnering with AWS to offer hybrid offerings, VMware can provide an alternative to Microsoft’s (with Azure Stack) or Nutanix’s hybrid offerings.