“The hybrid. It’s not just about cars. The newest hybrid in today’s fast lane is the cloud. Companies will adopt cloud computing using a combination of private and public clouds in a hybrid architecture based on their business needs and workload characteristics.”
Back in 2010, when I was researching cloud computing, the notion of Hybrid Cloud popped up quite frequently. Many CIO’s I talked with were thinking of the so-called hybrid model which included things like
- “Burst” out from an private to a public cloud when demands exceeded existing internal capacity
- Execute logic processing in the public cloud and leave the database in the internal data center
- Perform highly parallelized database processing in the cloud combined with other logic processing in the data center
- Augment on-premise storage with cloud storage (potentially from various vendors) in a hybrid model deployment.
Some of the unique aspects of public clouds working in concert with on-premise infrastructure include:
- Managing federated identity and security
- Migrating data, workloads, and applications
- Creating/buying and maintaining integration or “glue” applications to connect the clouds and to manage workflow and business processes
- Managing metering, billings, and relationships with multiple cloud vendors
Fast forward to 2012, where are we with Hybrid clouds? Unfortunately, it remains a pipe dream. Although several orchestration tools have emerged to solve the issue of dealing with a variety of clouds, the fact is that it only increased the complexity due to interoperability issues, lack of standards, and diverse underlying service and architectural models. What we have today are simply “mixed” models where customers have applications running in a public cloud and private cloud with precious little integration and cross cloud service orchestration.
The nirvana for customers is that they are able to use their familiar existing technologies, tools, and user interfaces to handle hybrid cloud scenarios seamlessly and securely, when applications in the cloud look and behave exactly like their counterparts within the datacenter from a performance, latency, and usability perspectives. We will get there one day.
You will find the predictions and viewpoints of the other experts on the panel interesting. Check out the show here.
[Download MP3] [itunes] [Bookmark Episode]
