Case Study - State IT Agency
cloudbolt.io 703.665.1060
"
The vRA learning curve is long and steep. We spent an
unreasonable amount of time, people resources, even
VMware professional services and never got vRA to
be an automated self-service portal across private and
public infrastructure."
Challenges
The Infrastructure as a Service team at the agency tried for two and half years to make
VMware's vRealize Automation (vRA) their automation and provisioning engine behind
delivery of their hybrid cloud infrastructure.
"The vRA learning curve is long and steep. We spent an unreasonable amount of time,
people resources, even VMware professional services and never got vRA to be an
automated self-service portal across private and public infrastructure," described the
agency's Infrastructure as a Service team leader. "vRA was very touchy, not highly
available; we expected more uptime. And given how complicated everything was in
vRA, we never realized the 'Return on Complexity' we should have."
The agency's team found other limitations with vRA. The product was not user-friendly
and required significant training and professional services.
"We also discovered that vRA is very VMware-centric and to get AWS or Azure
support, we would have had to upgrade to vRA Enterprise at a seven figure + upgrade
price," the agency explained.
Additionally, upgrading to VMware's latest version (vRA 8) would have required a
complete re-write of all the automation the agency's team spent years building, not to
mention that vRA doesn't provide self-service capabilities.
vRA is resource-intensive and requires lots of care and feeding. The agency's
infrastructure team wanted to explore alternatives. They sought a solution that was
less complex but supported multiple public clouds, required less people to maintain,
and provided self-service capabilities so they could better serve their agency partners
(or customers).