At the moment of hybrids, a new era opens up on cloud computing

For Kenny Mullican, the decision to use or not a hybrid cloud was once cut and dried. "It was a binary choice between your own servers and the use of a public cloud," said Paragon Films Inc.'s Chief Information Officer.

The fear of losing control of critical systems is one of the reasons why the company, which manufactures stretch films used in packaging, aims to transfer much of its processing workload into the cloud. . "Can you afford to let Microsoft choose the time of your downtime?", He said, referring to Microsoft Corp.'s Azure cloud service.

But with the advent of Azure Stack, a version of the cloud provider platform that runs in on-premises data centers, Mullican is taking a closer look at hybrid cloud options. His IT company does not have the resources to install and manage a full version of Azure, but he believes that nearby "collocation" vendors renting space for servers and other hardware could do the work. This could give Paragon the benefits of cloud virtualization without the latency and reliability penalties of a long-distance Internet connection and more personalized service.

"Now there seems to be a range of options," Mullican said. "It must not be one or the other."

This pretty much sums up the state of the hybrid cloud, a concept born from the early days of the public cloud infrastructure to describe a combination of private on-premise computing with one or more public clouds. The hybrid cloud quickly captured the industry's imagination. International Data Corp. has qualified the 2014 year of the hybrid cloud and Gartner Inc. expects that half of the companies will adopt a hybrid strategy by the year 2017.

More than ever, the concept is poised to upset the established order in public cloud computing. Indeed, hybrid computing has become a key competitive node in the cloud, adopted to varying degrees by almost everyone: the leading cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft, Microsoft , the Google LLC challenger and a range of traditional IT solutions. vendors such as Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. and VMware Inc., a majority-owned corporation of Dell Technologies Inc. All offer, or plan to offer, a variety of hybrid cloud offerings that will collectively redefine the billion-dollar information technology industry. .

Change definitions

The evolution of the hybrid cloud will be of concern to the thousands of IT professionals, engineers and vendors who will travel to San Francisco next week for Google's Cloud Next conference. These early predictions of hybrid cloud adoption have generally been realized, but a recent cross-pollination of technologies and commercial developments has significantly expanded hybrid cloud varieties.

David Floyer, founder and chief badyst of the research company Wikibon, a sister company of SiliconANGLE, recently proposed the emergence of five different types of hybrid clouds, ranging from autonomous clouds connected by networks to their more simple, complex "autonomous autonomous clouds" of various size and function processing pools exist independently, connect sporadically and operate in real time.

Gartner Inc. even virtually stopped using the term last year, considering it too limited. "I do not think the hybrid cloud is a useful term," said Craig Lowery, director of research at Gartner's group of service and technology providers. Instead, Gartner uses the term "hybrid computing" to describe the mix of virtualized servers, containers, microservices, and edge devices that IT organizations are determining how to manage.

Does the definition really matter or is it simply a semantic debate? Experts agree that it is important to have a common frame of reference when discussing the computer architecture, especially in areas such as cybersecurity, where data protection officers need to know exactly where they are. "When you move data back and forth [definition is] very relevant, especially in the regulated industries, "said Rohinee Mohindroo, co-founder of Dyjit LLC, which built its first hybrid cloud in 2010 as a CIO of a subsidiary of Rakuten Marketing LLC.

Beyond the burst

Early definitions of the hybrid cloud largely referred to cloud-based on-premise application extensions that could be deployed when needed, a tactic called "cloud burst." But the current reference models are much more sophisticated.

The hybrid cloud is evolving to encompbad complex scenarios such as autonomous device networks that orchestrate large autonomous fleets, each connected to multiple clouds. "Users now have powerful options for the location of items," said Brian Gracely, Red Hat Inc.'s Product Strategy Manager.

Most hybrid clouds initially consisted of an exploded agreement with a single public cloud provider. But today, said Jack Norris, senior vice president of data and applications at MapR Technologies Inc., "we see companies that want to treat the cloud as a service as part of an overall strategy." infrastructure, but not with a single provider. This is particularly the case for global companies whose needs have not been defined by one of the three largest public cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

Scalable drivers

Reference architectures for hybrid clouds are important because on-site computing is not for tomorrow. Wikibon expects corporate spending in private clouds – which are stacks of on-premise computing mimicking public cloud infrastructure – to grow by 32 percent annually by 2027. That's more than just double the rate of growth of the public cloud, although basic much smaller.

A recent study by managed hosting provider Cogeco Peer 1 Inc. found that 92% of respondents used on-site servers and two-thirds of them considered them to be extremely important to their business, according to Cindy Jordan-Ford. , general manager of the American and Latin companies of the company. US operations. "Hybrid computing is optimal for preserving existing solutions while implementing new technologies," she said. Most organizations use cloud providers to access services and tools that they can not create themselves, instead of migrating existing services to public clouds, she added.

Among the key drivers of the evolution of the hybrid cloud are the recent technological breakthroughs that have made it easier for users to transfer cross-platform processing loads and exploit the best infrastructure offerings. public cloud and software providers as services.

"Moore's law is at the level of computing power, [application program interface] level of software development and badysis, "said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies Inc., a consulting firm specializing in on-demand computing services. "As each becomes more powerful, he integrates more easily."

Economy API

The explosive growth of APIs – the number of APIs published has almost quadrupled since 2012, according to Programmable Web Inc. – has made it easier for developers to collect sophisticated applications by making use of the services offered on the Internet. This means that applications and data can be spread across multiple cloud and local environments, reducing the need to consolidate processing into a single cloud.

"You can place parts of your application in different places and communicate using remote procedure calls and APIs," said Gartner's Lowery. "It's a cloud architecture." The emergence of the Representational State Transfer or REST architecture as a consensual choice to expose web services has fueled the trend, he said.

APIs are independent of the cloud, reducing the need for users to align with specific cloud providers. They even offer software vendors as services a foot in the door with customers building hybrid clouds. For example, Salesforce.com Inc. is using its army of 4 million developers "to strengthen itself by allowing third parties to integrate into its platform," said Kaplan.

In fact, SaaS could be a joker in the hybrid cloud game. Providers can use APIs to capture a portion of their customers' business that might otherwise go to public cloud providers, especially to customers who are not interested in developing their own applications. Information Services Group Inc. recently surveyed 300 companies and found that 61% of them expect to be "SaaS majority" by the end of 2021, compared to 5% today. He said, the ISG badyst, Blair Hanley Frank, as part of CUBE, the broadcast media of SiliconANGLE. Platform.

However, applications using APIs have drawbacks that make them unusable for many business applications, said Arpan Shah, general manager of Azure marketing at Microsoft, which has a significant SaaS business. "The SaaS model will not be suitable for situations where a hybrid cloud model is needed to meet data compliance and sovereignty requirements, resolve network latency issues, and enable edge and disconnected scenarios," he said. -he declares.

Kubernetes and the edge

Kubernetes is another technological engine of the hybrid cloud. It is the open source software for software container network orchestration, which allows applications to run on private and public cloud platforms. Although it is still only in its infancy, Kubernetes promises a vast simplification of the management process of complex multilayer environments.

"I think that before Kubernetes, the hybrid cloud was not very feasible," said Brian Grant, senior software engineer at Google and one of Kubernetes' leading architects. Kubernetes gives companies the ability to unify critical caching systems, such as caching systems, messaging buses, and monitoring systems, in a way that was not feasible before, said Grant. "It took months, if not years, to create this environment, but with Kubernetes, you can do it in a few days."

The combination of containers, agile development methodologies and platform as a service "begins to reach the long-term goal of" bursting "for which virtual machines are not suitable," said Shah, Microsoft .

A third technological force is the emergence of "advanced computing," exemplified by "the Internet of Things," and the shift toward bringing the processing power closer to the point of data generation. Peripheral sensors, for example, must make decisions in a fraction of a second to decide whether to stop equipment in the factory or on point-of-sale terminals recommending discounts to customers based on the contents of their baskets. Autonomous vehicles will not have the time to transfer data from a car sensor to a cloud app to make a decision when the vehicle sits on a tree. By the time a response is received, the badembly line is crippled, the customer has left the store or the car is totalized.

"If you want data-driven applications that work in real time or in near real-time, you need to process the data where it was created," said Floyer of Wikibon. "You can not move everything to one place." Wikibon has estimated that the cost of transferring computing to the network edge also equates to one-sixth of that of data mining in the cloud.

According to James Kobielus, Edge Computing badyst, Edge Computing "is increasingly leading the hybrid multilayer architecture to radically distributed architectures. Round trips will be less and less necessary. "

Indeed, said Gracely Red Hat, "as companies become more familiar with the public cloud, they realize they do not need to think too much at all to be in the data center."

Tom Bittman, an badyst at Gartner, said in an article published in 2017 on the blog "The Ultimate Advantage of Cloud Computing" that cutting-edge computing will transform the way companies think about it. Cloud computing. Advanced data-hungry applications such as machine learning and augmented reality do not look like workloads in the cloud. Organizations that move faster to retool on the periphery will create a competitive advantage.

"The edge will create serious winners and losers," Bittman wrote. "We need to broaden our thinking beyond centralization and the cloud, moving to location processing and distributed processing for low-latency, real-time processing."

Activity Engines

The new face of the hybrid cloud is not just technological. The current craze for digital transformation has made businesses aware of the value of data and the difficulty of managing and securing it as it travels around the world.

In the early days of cloud computing, infrastructure providers as a service persuaded customers to transfer large amounts of data to cloud platforms, believing that the data needed to be located near their place of treatment. . Cloud service providers opted for inexpensive storage solutions and free bandwidth, but once they had the data in their hands, they often had trouble getting it back or making it expensive for them. customers. "Vendors are always looking for a lock-in," said Norris of MapR. Possession of data was the best way to achieve this goal.

This frustrated customers who wanted to arbitrate their cloud investments or transfer workloads to vendors whose tools best met their needs. "You're not going to use exabytes of data to transfer them to another cloud," said Lowery of Gartner. Many users still are not convinced by the experience of being tied to software vendors who have held their ransom of crucial data while raising prices and charging high maintenance fees. They now have better control over their own data and view the hybrid cloud as a form of investment protection.

According to this notion of "data severity", data is at the heart of decisions about how they are treated, a mantra often repeated by promoters of digital transformation. After allowing cloud vendors to take large amounts of their data, some users are now questioning the relevance of this strategy. They want to own the data and choose the services that they want to manage.

"Customers want more control over the stack of software," said Rhett Dillingham, vice president and senior badyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "I expect that in a few years, companies will have a set of applications not related to sticky surfaces that can be deployed across multiple platforms."

The Mullican DSI from Paragon Films has accepted. "It may be a pipe dream, but I think that's where it should go," he said.

Users define the agenda

As users gain more and more confidence in the public cloud, they are warning cloud providers that they need more flexibility to federate services. Their choice of a hybrid cloud model depends less and less on the capacity and needs of the business.

Gracely cited the example of two automobile companies with very different visions for their markets. One of them wishing to optimize the experience aboard the vehicle, so he chose to use a central private cloud to connect to a system of entertainment and information located in the vehicle and collect data on how the options were used. The other focused on optimizing an online shopping experience to alleviate customer discomfort about working with dealerships. He has opted for a public cloud approach, using APIs to exploit a variety of video and social media channels, as well as links to his legacy configuration system.

"You can now start from the experience and use the cloud or third parties to do things you could never do before," said Gracely.

Large public cloud companies understood the message and responded with on-premise offerings replicating their stacks of cloud software. Microsoft owns Azure Stack, Amazon has outposts not yet shipped, and Google has its cloud services platform. For their part, traditional IT companies have become hopes in the cloud – IBM with Cloud Private, Oracle with Cloud at Customer and VMware with major partnerships linking the cloud and data centers. "Most of the big cloud providers have accepted the fact that they have to coexist," Mohindroo said.

However, even if the top three vendors 'offerings extend customers' hybrid options into the sphere of influence of a given cloud provider, they do not allow customers to easily move data and workload as they see fit.

Cloud service providers claim that they simply simplify things for their customers. "We can not create a different application for each type of Edge device and run two different environments, like [one for] cloud and [one for] edge, said Shah. "Such a model will not be effective, secure, manageable and profitable."

Over time, IaaS providers say they will make borders transparent. "What we hear from customers on a regular basis is that they would like to be able to leverage their existing on-premise data centers when they are not ready to retire as transparently as possible with AWS in the cloud." said AWS Director Andy Jbady. at the end of November at his annual conference re: Invent.

Although the hybrid service announced at the time, Outposts, does not offer all AWS cloud services on-site when it will be available late this year, "this suite will offer the same on-site experience, to the periphery and downstream. the cloud, "said Eron Kelly, general manager of business services marketing at AWS.

Local cloud stacks are convenient, but they should also encourage customers to stay in the orbit of a given cloud provider, which makes some users skeptical. "You have to ask yourself if vendors offer on-premise solutions because they think it's a better solution or they're using it to keep users on their public cloud infrastructure." Colin Bodell, Technical Director of Groupon Inc. "In my opinion, it's a stepping stone to the public cloud."

Continuum of choice

Cloud providers do not agree. "Make [hybrid cloud] in a sustainable way, it must work as a single environment, which requires both consistency and completeness, "said Microsoft's shah. This means having a consistent way to create applications, a common set of database choices, a reliable network, and unified identity and access management. Microsoft has made several improvements to Azure Stack that address issues such as security, cost accounting, and monitoring, but it is clear that customers benefit more from working with a single cloud vendor than from the combination of cloud computing. 39, a heterogeneous set of services.

"Multicloud requires skills to understand different clouds, which becomes difficult when businesses face a talent shortage in the cloud," Shah said. "It also adds operational complexity."

AWS Kelly accepted. Many CIOs "start believing that they will be sharing their workload in the cloud between two or three vendors, but when they get into the practice and rigor of evaluating it, very few end up choosing that path," did he declare. I said. Among the drawbacks of the multi-layered approach mentioned is the need to be satisfied with the functionality of the "lowest common denominator", the difficulty of simultaneously switching to hybrid and multilayer models, and the loss of discounts and other benefits. for users who work with a single provider.

There is no doubt that federating multiple public and private cloud services creates complexity, but is the choice worth it? According to Dillingham, customers seem willing to accept some difficulties in exchange for flexibility. "Placing more workloads on a single cloud platform can bring you benefits in areas such as training, tools, and discounts, but most users seem to prefer the flexibility of a multi-vendor path." sources, "he said.

Could the growing preference for choice change the balance of power in the public cloud market? "Yes," said Chris Wolf, Global Technical Director of VMware Inc. "As you move more functionality closer to the customer, it creates a risk of disruption.

VMware, IBM and many other customers rely on customer demand for choice to meet the need for services that can manage multiple cloud services. VMware has a close partnership with AWS to enable customers to easily move workloads between their own infrastructure and the public cloud giant, but the agreement is not exclusive and VMware is betting that customers will want more flexibility. "The work we do with cloud computing providers is to let their customers work where it makes the most sense," Wolf said. "We can provide a platform with common security, networks, management and systems, whatever the business needs."

Cloud providers offer all the benefits of consistency and simplicity to stay in one platform. All strive to meet customer demands for a broad range of development tools and enhanced support for advanced devices. AWS intends to do everything: integrate network, security, and access control with automated work migrations, and then extend AWS services to local and peripheral sites so that our customers can easily use AWS as a backup. seamlessly expand their existing infrastructure investments, Kelly said.

Their message is echoed by users such as Groupon's Bodell, who is currently migrating from the on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud. "My preference is to choose a single cloud provider," he said. "I do not want to do the maintenance work myself."

As the continuum continues to expand between unique and fully autonomous options, users will have more choice than ever to choose their favorite hybrid models. In the end, the definition of the hybrid cloud will be the one that each company chooses to create.

Image: Gellinger / Pixabay