Amazon Web Services is taking the battle to VMware with new plugin

In case you didn’t believe Amazon is hungry for public cloud revenue from the biggest businesses, get this: Amazon has announced a new plugin for VMware’s popular vCenter software for managing data center infrastructure. Admins of VMware-based on-premises data centers can now set up and manage Amazon cloud resources right from within vCenter with the new AWS Management Portal, according to a blog post on the new plugin from Amazon cloud chief evangelist Jeff Barr. And admins can move virtual machines from their data centers to Amazon’s cloud.

There’s two types of winners. Those who rest on their laurels and slowly grow slow and fat whilst enjoying the fruits of their domination. These winners tend to, over time, fall by the wayside. The other type of winner takes their dominant position and leverages it for even further gains – some might suggest this is merely in the pursuit of ever-greater excellence, while other might say it’s a little over-competitive. No matter what its rationale, it’s fair to say that Amazon Web Services (AW) is one of the latter types of winners. Not content to utterly dominate the recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant for public IaaS (in which the company had around 83% of the total market share, some five times all the other vendors’ business combined), AWS is gunning for VMware, perhaps one of the biggest names in infrastructure management globally. The company announced this week that it was making available a connector to bridge between AWS andVMware VMW -2.17%’s vCenter management console. What this means is that administrators can directly import management tools for AWS infrastructure into their VMware-based on premises data centers.