I Miss vCenter — So I’m Building My Own (in AWS)

I’ve been living in AWS long enough that I’m supposed to have moved on.

I can design multi-account landing zones, argue about Transit Gateways vs. VPC peering, and recite IAM best practices in my sleep. I understand why cloud-native patterns exist. I even agree with most of them.

But if I’m being honest?

I miss vCenter.

The Comfort of a Single Pane of Glass

Back in the vSphere days, vCenter was home base. One UI. One mental model. One place where I could:

• See all my workloads
• Understand capacity at a glance
• Migrate compute without rewriting the world
• Apply policies consistently
• Fix problems visually instead of spelunking through APIs

Yes, it was centralized. Yes, it had limitations. Yes, it could be fragile.

But it was coherent.

In AWS, coherence is… optional.

AWS Is Powerful — But Fragmented

Don’t get me wrong: AWS is incredible. The primitives are flexible, scalable, and battle-tested. But as an operator, the experience is scattered:

• EC2 over here
• ASGs over there
• Load balancers somewhere else
• Metrics in CloudWatch
• Config in tags (maybe)
• Inventory split across accounts and regions

The AWS Console isn’t lying to you — but it also isn’t telling you the whole story in one place.

Instead of operating infrastructure, I often feel like I’m assembling context.

What vCenter Got Right

vCenter wasn’t just a hypervisor manager. It was an operations platform:

• Strong inventory model
• Clear parent/child relationships
• First-class lifecycle concepts
• Human-readable abstractions
• Predictable workflows

You didn’t need five services and a wiki page just to answer:

“What’s running where, and why?”

So… I’m Building My Own vCenter (Sort Of)

I’m not trying to recreate vSphere in the cloud. That would miss the point.

What I am doing is building a control plane on top of AWS Using APIS that gives me back what I miss:

• A unified inventory across accounts and regions
• Opinionated metadata instead of tag chaos
• Clear ownership and lifecycle states
• Capacity and cost visibility that makes sense to humans
• Operational workflows that don’t start with “open three consoles”

Think less “hypervisor replacement” and more operator experience layer.

AWS provides the raw materials. I’m just putting a dashboard, model, and brain on top of them.

Cloud-Native Doesn’t Have to Mean Operator-Hostile

Somewhere along the way, “cloud-native” became synonymous with:

• More YAML
• More dashboards
• More glue code
• More tribal knowledge

But abstraction isn’t the enemy. Bad abstraction is.

vCenter succeeded because it respected how humans think about systems. AWS succeeds because it gives you freedom. The gap between the two is where a lot of operator pain lives.

That gap is exactly what I’m trying to close.

This Is Not Nostalgia — It’s a Design Problem

I don’t miss vCenter because it was old.

I miss it because it solved real operational problems well.

If we can acknowledge that, we can stop pretending the current state is perfect — and start building better tools on top of the cloud we actually run.

So yes, I’m an AWS admin Now.

And yes, I miss vCenter.

That’s why I’m building my own. More to come