Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform that helps organizations of all sizes confidently migrate to the cloud by leveraging expertise and solutions. It delivers organizational, technical and operational capabilities needed to successfully migrate to the cloud.
VMware Cloud is a platform that enables customers to move to the cloud swiftly and confidently by using the VMware tools and infrastructure they are already familiar with. VMware enables users to leverage the correct environment for each application and lower operational and hardware costs.
| Features | AWS | VMware |
| Application migration | Yes | Yes |
| Server migration | Yes | No |
| Virtual desktop deployment | Yes | Yes |
| Refactoring | Yes | Yes |
| Business continuity and disaster protection | Yes | Yes |
| Workload rebalancing | No | Yes |
Before migration, organizations need to assess their cloud readiness. They need to outline their desired business outcomes and present a business case for cloud migration. AWS offers tools that enable businesses to assess their on-premises resources to generate an enhanced cost projection for running their applications in AWS. The Migration Evaluator provides projections of the total cost of ownership for AWS based on the resource utilization of a business as well as years of AWS’s experience in helping customers optimize their licenses.
AWS Cloud Economics Center can help users to develop compelling business cases for migration. AWS offers another service, AWS Prescriptive Guidance, that enables customers to review migration and modernization strategies, patterns and guides after creating a business case.
Similarly, VMware, through Migration Assessment from CloudHealth, provides customers with the ability to understand which workloads are suitable for migration and gives insight into the TCO of the migration. CloudHealth constantly monitors the performance and configuration of physical and virtual servers running in at least one data center. Its analysis of this data produces recommendations for migrating a workload or a subset of infrastructure running the workload.
These recommendations are made based on the types of assets, the region, reservations and projected costs. Users can compare the TCO of running workloads in the public cloud versus on-premises and make the right decisions for their prospective migration initiatives.
AWS uses the AWS Migration Hub to deliver the tools customers require to simplify their cloud migration journeys. Customers can move to the cloud and then rearchitect applications in AWS. They can take advantage of the AWS Application Migration Service to lift and shift servers from physical, virtual or cloud infrastructure to AWS.
The AWS Application Migration Service automatically converts the source servers of its customers to run natively on AWS and simplifies migration by enabling users to utilize the same automated processes for a wide scope of applications.
VMware Cloud migration solutions offer users a path to the cloud through application migration to any cloud. The consistency offered by VMware infrastructure and operations helps to streamline cloud migration as the same compute, network, storage and Kubernetes stack run on any cloud, edge and data center.
Users can also choose and connect to their local migration specialists to expedite migration initiatives. They get self-service through on-demand workload migration services and the ability to migrate at their pace through customized migration suited to their needs. VMware also delivers risk management for large-scale projects.
AWS lets users accelerate application modernization after migration to help them reduce costs, improve efficiency and derive the most value from their existing investments. The hyper-scale scope of services provided and the level of automation offered by AWS provides incremental savings with time and enables enterprises to retire costly legacy infrastructure.
Additionally, with AWS, cloud migration and application modernization plans are based on the needs of an enterprise as opposed to licensing or agreements. AWS Migration Hub provides the tools businesses need for their migration and modernization journeys.
VMware also offers capabilities to enable businesses to modernize their applications. The tool approaches application modernization by letting businesses focus on automating as much of the time and effort spent on the infrastructure supporting their applications. It accelerates the development of modern applications by automating the application build, deploy and run pipelines.
With VMware, developers can use secured microservices and containers to simplify the application development process and automate their processes of pushing their code to production. VMware Tanzu portfolio offers features for creating, running and managing modern applications. Ultimately, VMware delivers quick time to value by splitting the modernization journey into short, discrete and mainly automatable steps.
Since both AWS and VMware Cloud are impressive cloud migration tools, the choice between them boils down to their use cases. Prospective customers should consider AWS if their needs predominantly revolve around exiting from data centers, renovating legacy systems and optimizing cloud operations.
On the other hand, they should consider VMware if their use cases prioritize the ability to deploy virtual desktops from their cloud environments, consolidate their data centers and ensure availability with disaster recovery.
