Migrate from Aria Operations & Cloud Foundation to Kestra

Kestra & VMware Aria Automation (vRealize)

Kestra is an open-source workflow orchestrator and a compelling alternative to VMware’s orchestration suite (VMware Aria Automation, formerly vRealize Automation, now part of VMware Cloud Foundation). While VMware’s automation tools have become increasingly expensive and restrictive, Kestra offers a cost-effective, flexible solution with cutting-edge features. Aria Automation is only sold as part of the Cloud Foundation bundle – eliminating standalone or SaaS options – and many customers have seen drastic price increases as a result. In contrast, Kestra’s open-source model has no licensing fees and avoids vendor lock-in altogether.

The Aria Automation SaaS is now discontinued, and little new functionality has been added beyond rebranding. These pain points are driving DevOps teams to explore Kestra as a modern, open alternative that delivers better automation benefits without the drawbacks.

Why Teams Replace VMware with Kestra

Organizations facing these challenges are turning to Kestra, which addresses the core pain points through a fundamentally different approach. Here’s why many teams are replacing VMware’s automation stack with Kestra:

• Open-Source & Cost Savings: Kestra is Apache 2.0 licensed open source, meaning no licensing fees or per-CPU costs. This dramatically lowers TCO compared to VMware’s proprietary platform, which now only comes as an expensive bundle. (Some VMware customers have even been hit with 10×–15× price quotes) By adopting Kestra, companies avoid these massive price hikes and costly renewals.
• Declarative YAML Workflows: Kestra defines workflows in a pure declarative YAML format, treating automation as code. This makes it easy to version-control and reuse workflows (GitOps-friendly) and improves readability. VMware Aria, on the other hand, often requires a mix of YAML blueprints plus imperative scripts or manual configurations to accomplish tasks. Kestra’s code-first approach improves pipeline maintenance and is more developer-friendly than VMware’s script-heavy automation.
• Event-Driven Orchestration: Kestra is inherently event-driven – workflows can trigger on external events, API calls, message queues, or schedules for real-time automation. This enables responsive, asynchronous processing (e.g. reacting to CI/CD events or data streams). VMware Aria Automation’s usage is primarily request- or schedule-based with more limited external event support. Kestra’s native event triggers let you build reactive DevOps processes (such as auto-scaling, incident response, etc.) that VMware’s tools struggle to match out-of-the-box.
• Broad Integration & Vendor-Neutral: Kestra has a broad plugin ecosystem and an API-first, vendor-neutral design. It integrates with virtually any technology stack – Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD tools, configuration management (Ansible), IaC provisioning (Terraform), ITSM systems (ServiceNow), databases, cloud services, and more. Kestra doesn’t favor any particular cloud or vendor, avoiding lock-in. In contrast, VMware Aria is deeply tied to the VMware ecosystem (vSphere, NSX, vSAN) with relatively limited support for non-VMware tools. Extending VMware’s automation to work across diverse platforms often requires custom scripting or additional products, whereas Kestra connects to everything out-of-the-box.
• Faster Deployment & Easier Maintenance: Kestra can be up and running in minutes on your infrastructure of choice – deployable via Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm with a lightweight footprint. Its simple setup means lower operational overhead and faster time to value. VMware’s automation suite, by comparison, is known for high complexity and deployment overhead – installs and upgrades often span weeks and may require professional services assistance. Notably, Broadcom ended the vRealize/Aria SaaS service, forcing customers back to complex on-premises deployments. Kestra’s ease of installation and management (no special appliances or lengthy configuration needed) lets teams start automating quickly without the headaches.
• Scalability & Multi-Tenancy: Kestra is cloud-native and built to scale horizontally. Its distributed architecture (with technologies like Kafka under the hood) supports running thousands of workflows per hour across nodes, and it includes multi-tenant namespace isolation for different teams or customers. VMware Aria Automation is typically a single-tenant, monolithic deployment per environment – scaling to new teams or use cases often means standing up additional separate instances, since it lacks true multi-tenancy. In short, Kestra can handle large-scale enterprise workloads and serve multiple teams from one platform, whereas VMware’s solution can become unwieldy at scale.

Feature Comparison Table

Kestra for Modern IT Automation

Modern IT environments demand an orchestration platform that is agile, interoperable, and aligned with DevOps practices. Kestra checks these boxes by treating automation as code, being event-driven, and working across any environment. Platform teams can define everything from infrastructure provisioning to CI/CD pipelines or even data workflows in Kestra’s YAML format, and trigger these flows via events or schedules. This unified approach means a DevOps engineer can use one tool to automate cloud resources, Docker workloads, database ops, and more – all while leveraging familiar GitOps processes and version control for workflows. Kestra’s language-agnostic execution (support for scripts in Python, Bash, JavaScript, etc.) and rich plugin library allow it to orchestrate practically any task, across on-prem and multi-cloud, without custom coding or vendor-specific constraints.

VMware’s orchestration tools, in contrast, stem from a virtualization-centric era. They excel at managing VMware-based infrastructure, but are less adaptable to the cloud-native and multi-toolchain reality of today’s IT. For example, VMware Aria is primarily used for provisioning VMs and related IT services within vSphere/VCF, whereas Kestra can orchestrate any workflow – from spinning up Kubernetes clusters to coordinating data pipelines – in a single platform. This makes Kestra especially attractive for teams that need to automate across diverse technologies and avoid being confined to one vendor’s ecosystem.

By replacing expensive, complex VMware automation with Kestra, organizations gain agility and control. DevOps engineers benefit from a simpler, code-centric workflow engine that integrates with their entire toolchain. IT managers appreciate the significant cost savings and the elimination of license headaches and surprise price hikes. Platform architects can design automation solutions without vendor lock-in, leveraging Kestra’s open APIs and plugins to fit into any environment or cloud. In summary, Kestra delivers an event-driven, scalable, and cost-effective orchestration platform for modern IT – a compelling alternative for enterprises seeking to escape VMware’s high prices and complexity, and embrace a more flexible approach to automation.