Information Center

Is cloud computing entering a new era with blooming hybrid flowers?

  

For Kenny Mullican, CIO of Paragon Films, a plastic and rubber manufacturer, the decision on whether to use hybrid cloud has long been made. "This is a binary comparison between your own server and using a public cloud," he said.

Worrying about losing control of mission critical systems is one of the reasons that prevent the company from transferring most of its processing work to cloud computing. "Can you afford the downtime for choosing Microsoft?" Mullican naturally refers to Microsoft's Azure cloud service.

However, with the emergence of Azure Stack, Mullican began to pay more attention to the choice of hybrid cloud. Azure Stack is a product provided by the vendor platform that can run in the local data center. Although Mulican believes that their company's IT department does not have enough resources to deploy and maintain a full version of Azure, he believes that those "hosting" vendors can provide rental services for servers and other hardware. US server This will bring the benefits of cloud virtualization to Paragon instead of the delay and reliability loss caused by long-distance Internet connection, and it can also provide more personalized services.

"There seems to be a range of options," Mullican said. "There is no need for this or that."

This roughly describes the state of hybrid cloud. The concept of "hybrid cloud" appeared in the early days of public cloud infrastructure, and it was used to describe the combination of private local computing and one or more public clouds. Later, hybrid cloud quickly attracted the attention of the industry. For example, IDC called 2014 the year of hybrid cloud, and Gartner also said that in 2017, general enterprises will adopt hybrid strategies.

Today, this concept seems more meaningful than ever, because it is breaking the established order in the public cloud computing field. In fact, hybrid computing has become the key to cloud computing competition. Almost every participant supports hybrid cloud in different degrees: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and traditional companies such as Oracle, IBM, Dell and VMware all provide hybrid cloud products in various styles, Together, these manufacturers and products are defined as an IT industry worth billions of dollars.

Definition of change

The development of hybrid cloud will become a top priority for thousands of IT professionals, engineers and suppliers, who will soon gather in San Francisco to participate in Google's Cloud Nex conference. Although most of the early predictions about hybrid cloud applications have been realized, the interaction between recent technology and business development has greatly enriched the types of hybrid clouds.

David Freud, founder and chief analyst of the research company, Wikibon, a sister company of Silicon ANGLE, recently proposed the emergence of five different types of hybrid clouds, including all kinds of autonomous clouds from the simplest network connection to the most complex "autonomous independent cloud". Processing pools of various sizes and functions exist independently, occasionally connected and operated in real time.

Gartner almost stopped using the word "mix" last year because the graduate company thought its scope was too limited. "I don't think hybrid cloud is a useful term in itself," said Craig Lowery, research director of Gartner's technology and service supply group. On the contrary, Gartner uses the term "Hybrid IT" to describe a hybrid of virtualized servers, containers, microservices, and how IT organizations are studying how to manage edge devices.

Does this definition really matter? Or is it just a semantic argument? Experts agree that it is very important to have a common reference framework when discussing IT architecture, especially in areas such as network security, where the person responsible for protecting data needs to know the exact location of data. Rohinee Mohindroo, co-founder of Dyjit LLC, said, "When you move data back and forth, (definition) is very important, especially in regulated industries."

Transcending explosion

The early definition of hybrid cloud mainly refers to cloud based local application extension, which can be deployed when needed. This strategy is called "cloud bursting". But today's reference models are much more complex.

Hybrid clouds are developing, including complex scenarios, such as autonomous device networks, which coordinate large autonomous devices, and each device is connected to multiple clouds. Brian Gracely, director of product strategy at Red Hat, said, "People are very selective about where to place things."

In fact, most hybrid clouds initially emerged from the sudden combination with a single public cloud provider. But today, Jack Norris, senior VP of MapR data and applications, said, "We see that some organizations want to take cloud services as part of their overall infrastructure strategy, rather than working with only one provider. This is especially true for global companies whose needs are not defined by one of the three" public cloud providers "(AWS, Microsoft and Google).

Driving factors in evolution

The reference architecture of the hybrid cloud is important because local computing will not make any progress in the short term. Wikibon predicts that by 2027, enterprises' spending on private clouds will grow at an annual rate of 32%. This is more than twice the number of public clouds, although the base is much smaller.

Cindy Jordan Ford, general manager of the U.S. and Latin America businesses of the hosting provider Cogeco Peer 1, said that a recent study of the company found that 92% of the respondents used local servers, and two thirds of the respondents believed that these servers were very important to their business. She said, "While implementing new technologies, hybrid IT is the best choice to retain existing solutions." She added that most enterprises use cloud providers to access services and tools that they cannot build themselves, rather than migrating existing services to the public cloud.

Another factor driving the development of hybrid cloud is the recent technological progress, which makes it easier for users to transfer and process loads between platforms, while taking advantage of the best products from public cloud infrastructure and SaaS providers.

API Economics

According to the data of Programable Web, since 2012, the explosive growth of APIs (the number of published APIs is about four times that of 2012) has made it easier for developers to integrate complex applications by accessing services exposed on the Internet. This means that applications and data can spread across multiple clouds and local environments, reducing the need for consolidation in a single cloud.

Gartner's Lowery said, "You can put parts of the application in different places and use remote procedure calls and APIs to communicate." "This is an architecture that spans the cloud. He said that the emergence of declarative state transfer or REST architecture as a consistent choice of public web services has promoted this trend.

Moreover, the API is independent of the cloud, which reduces the need for users to align with specific cloud providers. They can even bring cooperation opportunities to SaaS suppliers. Jeff Kaplan, the management director of THINKstrategies, an on-demand computing service consulting company, said that Salesforce is using its 4 million developers to "enhance its strength by allowing it to integrate with third-party platforms".

In fact, SaaS may be a "trump card" in hybrid cloud games. Suppliers can use APIs to obtain customers' business, otherwise these businesses may flow to public cloud suppliers, especially those customers who are not interested in developing their own applications. ISG recently conducted a survey of 300 companies, and the results show that by the end of 2021, 61% of the companies believe they will become "the majority of SaaS", compared with 5% today, ISG analyst Blair Hanley Frank said in an interview.

However, Arpan Shah, general manager of marketing of Microsoft Azure with a large number of SaaS businesses, believes that the shortcomings of API load applications make them unsuitable for many commercial purposes. "The SaaS model is not applicable, because a hybrid cloud model is required to meet the requirements of compliance and data sovereignty, solve the network delay problem, and enable the scenarios of edge and disconnection."

Kubernetes and Edges

Another technical driver of hybrid cloud is Kubernetes, which is an open source application used to orchestrate software container networks. It can enable applications to run on private and public cloud platforms. Although still in its early stages, Kubernetes' commitment will greatly simplify the process of managing complex and cloudy environments.

"I think before Kubernetes, hybrid cloud is not very feasible," said Brian Grant, Google's chief software engineer, who is also one of the main architects of Kubernetes. Kubernetes enables organizations to unify basic pipelines such as caching systems, messaging buses, and system monitors in a previously infeasible way, Grant said. "It used to take months or years to create this environment, but with Kubernetes, you can do it in a few days."

The combination of container, agile development method and PaaS "starts to realize the long-term goal that virtual machines are not suitable for 'explosion'," Microsoft's Shah said.

Next, the third technical force is the rise of "edge computing", represented by the "Internet of Things", and the processing capacity is approaching the data generation point. Examples of edge devices include sensors, which need to decide instantly whether to shut down the equipment in the factory, or recommend the point of sale terminal with discount to customers according to the contents of the shopping basket. Autonomous cars will not need to transfer data from car sensors to cloud applications to make decisions when the car is about to hit a tree. Because when the response is received, the assembly line may be paralyzed, the customer has left the store or the car has been scrapped.

"If you want a data-driven application to process data in real time or near real time, you must process data where it was created," said Wikibon's Floyer. "You can't move it all to one place." Wikibon estimates that the cost of pushing computing to the edge of the network is also one sixth of the cost of extracting data into the cloud.

Wikibon analyst James Kobielus pointed out that edge computing "is pushing more hybrid and multi cloud architectures towards distributed architectures. There is less and less demand for round-trip."

In fact, Red Hat's Gracely said, "As companies become more familiar with public clouds, they realize that they don't have to think too much about investing in data centers."

Gartner analyst Tom Bittman said in his blog post "The Edge Will Eat the Cloud" in 2017 that edge computing will change the view of enterprises on cloud computing. Data intensive edge applications such as machine learning and augmented reality are completely different from the workloads handled in the cloud today. The fastest reorganized organization at the edge will create a competitive advantage.

"The edge will create some big winners and big losers," Bittman said. "We need to extend our thinking beyond centralized and cloud computing, and extend it to location and distributed processing to achieve low latency and real-time processing."

Business drivers

The change of hybrid cloud is not only related to technology. The current upsurge of digital transformation reminds enterprises of the value of data and the difficulty of managing and protecting data when it flows around the world.

In the embryonic period of cloud computing, IaaS suppliers persuaded customers to transfer a large amount of data to the cloud platform, because the data should be located near the place where the data is processed. Cloud providers use low-cost storage and free bandwidth as incentives, but once they have data, they often bring inconvenience to customers or make them pay a high price to retrieve data. Norris of MapR said: "Suppliers always want to lock in the market." Having data is the best way to achieve this goal.

This frustrates customers who want to take advantage of cloud investment arbitrage or transfer workloads to suppliers that meet their needs. Gartner's Lowery said, "You can't transfer EB (IEB=1024PB, 1PB=1024TB) data to another cloud." Many users are still angry about the experience of binding to software vendors, who, while raising prices and charging high maintenance fees, also hold their mission critical data and earn ransom. They become more astute in maintaining control over their own data, and regard hybrid cloud as a form of investment protection.

The concept of "data gravity" believes that data is the core of deciding how to deal with data, which is often repeated by supporters of digital transformation. After allowing cloud providers to obtain a large amount of data, some users are now questioning whether this strategy is wise. They want to own data and choose services that want to manage data.

"Customers want more control over the software stack," said Rhett Dillingham, VP and senior analyst of Moore Insights&Strategy. "I predict that in the next few years, enterprises will have a series of applications that are not attached to sticky surfaces and can be deployed across multiple platforms."

Mullican, CIO of Paragon Films, agreed. He said, "Maybe this is just a daydream, but I think this is the final result."

Users set items

As users become more confident in the public cloud, they remind cloud providers that they need greater flexibility to provide services. Users' choice of hybrid cloud model will depend less on capacity and more on business requirements.

Gracely gave the example of two automobile companies that have different visions of their respective markets. One of the companies wants to optimize the in car experience, so they choose to use the central private cloud to connect to the in car entertainment and information systems, and collect data about the use of options. The other focuses on optimizing online shopping and purchase experience to ease customers' anxiety about cooperating with dealers. It uses a public cloud approach, uses APIs to access various video and social media channels, and keeps in touch with its legacy configuration system.

Gracely said, "You can now start from experience and use the cloud or a third party to do things you could not do before."

Large public cloud companies received this message and responded by launching localized products of their cloud software stack. Microsoft owns Azure Stack, Amazon owns Unpublished Outposts, and Google owns its own cloud service platform. For traditional IT companies, they also want to become competitors of cloud computing, such as IBM working with private cloud computing, Oracle working with client cloud computing, and VMware working with major partners connecting cloud computing and data centers. Mohindroo said: "Most large cloud providers have accepted the fact that they need to coexist."

Although the products of the three giants have expanded customers' mixed choices within the influence range of specific cloud providers, they do not allow customers to easily transfer data and workloads according to their own wishes.

Cloud providers say they just make things easier for customers. Shah said, "It is impossible for us to build a different application for each edge device and run two different environments at the same time, such as cloud computing and edge. This mode will not be efficient, secure, controllable and cost-effective."

IaaS vendors say they will make the boundaries transparent over time. "What we always hear from customers is that they want to run the existing local data center, and they are not ready to retire and connect to the AWS cloud as seamlessly as possible," said AWS CEO Andy Jassy at the re: Invent conference last November.

Although AWS's hybrid service Outposts may not provide all AWS cloud service functions, the general manager of AWS enterprise service marketing, Eron Kelly, explained that "this suite will provide the same experience in local, edge and cloud all the time".

The local cloud stack looks really convenient, but it also means that customers need to be attracted to stay in the orbit of specific cloud providers, which makes some users suspicious. "You must ask the suppliers whether they provide local solutions, because (we don't know) they think it is a better way, or they use it to keep people on the public cloud infrastructure?" Groupon CTOColin Bodell asked, "My prejudice is that it is the stepping stone of the public cloud."

Continuous selection

Cloud suppliers are not very impressed with the view in the previous paragraph. "To do it in a lasting way (hybrid cloud), it needs to run like a single environment, which requires consistency and comprehensiveness," said Shah of Microsoft, which means that there should be a consistent method to build applications, a set of public database choices, reliable networks Unified identification and access management. Microsoft has introduced some enhancements to Azure Stack to solve problems such as security, cost accounting, and monitoring. However, Microsoft insists that customers gain more value from cooperating with a single cloud provider than from processing a set of heterogeneous services.

"Multi cloud needs skills to understand different clouds. When the company faces a shortage of cloud talents, Record free server This will become challenging, "he continued." It will also increase the complexity of the operation. "

Kelly of AWS believes that many CIOs "began to believe that they would distribute their workload in the cloud relatively evenly between two or three suppliers, but when they entered into practicality and evaluated rigor, few people finally took this route". The disadvantages of the diversification methods he listed include the need to meet the "lowest common denominator" function, the difficulty of converting to mixed and multi cloud models at the same time, and the loss of discounts and other incentives caused by users' cooperation with a single supplier.

There is no doubt that combining multiple public and private cloud services will lead to complexity, but is the choice worth weighing? Dillingham said that customers seemed willing to accept some pain in exchange for flexibility. "Pushing more workload to a single cloud platform can bring you benefits such as training, tools and discounts, but most users seem to prefer the flexibility of multi-path.".

Will the growing preference for choice change the balance of power in the public cloud market? "Yes," said Chris Wolf, CTO of VMware's global field. "When you transfer more capabilities to customers, there will be the possibility of destruction."

VMware, IBM, and many other companies are relying on customers' choice requirements to drive the demand for services that can proxy multiple cloud services. VMware has established a close partnership with AWS to focus on making it easy for customers to transfer workloads between their own infrastructure and public cloud giants, but this deal is not unique. VMware believes that customers need more flexibility. "Our work with cloud providers is to let their customers operate in the most meaningful place," Wolf continued. "We can provide a platform with common security, network, management and business requirements."

Cloud providers emphasize the advantages of consistency and simplicity in a single platform, and everyone is trying to meet customers' needs for various development tools and better support for edge devices. AWS plans to "integrate network, security and access control to provide power for automated workload migration, expand AWS services to local and edge locations, so that our customers can easily use AWS as a seamless expansion of their existing infrastructure investment", Kelly said.

Their news resonated with users like Groupon's Bodell, who is currently participating in the company's fourth migration from local deployment of infrastructure to public cloud. "My preference is to choose a cloud provider," he said. "I don't want to do maintenance by myself."

As users continue to expand between one size fits all and fully autonomous options, they will have more choices to select and choose their preferred hybrid models. Ultimately, the definition of a hybrid cloud will be the goal chosen by each organization.