Part 2: A VC and Entrepreneur in the Cloud (Part 2 of 3), How the Cloud of Clouds will Evolve, Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud

By Tiffine Wang & Nelu Mihai

In our previous article, Introduction to the Cloud of Clouds, Nelu and I broke down the various clouds and their unique propositions. Today, we will discuss multi cloud and hybrid cloud.

Choosing the right cloud for the right application from a price, performance, and security perspective is not a simple process. For many customers, AWS provides all the needed functionality, being almost a complete software universe on its own. However, many large customers are afraid of the “one-vendor-trap” and will try to use several cloud providers for different applications. This strategy raises a few significant issues: portability of applications, data management and security.

Security

Securing a multi-cloud or hybrid architecture is complex and will require a multilayered strategy. It has to be part of the architecture’s DNA. Security tools will need to guarantee access to applications without affecting their performance and response time, no matter what proprietary mechanisms cloud providers use.

They need to provide information security for company data hosted in or connected with each provider. Compliance needs to be ensured, as new features are added. For example, Firewall rules are different in AWS than in Azure or on a Palo Alto. There are also huge risks in the seams of the orchestrator (either at cluster boundary or at the boundary between two different orchestration systems).

It is important to understand that threats are often not cloud-specific. Threats such as ransomware and data breaches can occur in cloud environments as well as traditional ones. Blockchain, quantum computing and AI are areas worth exploring to better identify and prevent threats.

Challenges Inherent to Multi-cloud

The heterogeneity of hardware and software infrastructure in a multicloud system can increase security risks, as well as complexity. A truly useful multicloud system needs to provide users and applications a secure and simple centralized interface, which is agnostic of the underlying distributed infrastructure.

But perhaps the biggest challenge in multicloud systems are proprietary applications that constrains portability between cloud systems. Google is trying to overcome such challenges by using Kubernetes containers, as every cloud provider supports it. Google’s trio of Kube, Istio, and Knative frameworks have been designed to work seamlessly with Kubernetes and in doing so provides a universal cloud native quasi operating system which can constitute as the skeleton of a multicloud standard architecture. This is a Multicloud Platform as a Service (MPaaS) with a pure containerized environment. We need to underscore that Kubernetes has a multi-compute architecture, not multi-cloud. In order to support native multicloud new and revolutionary architectures are needed.

Data Management in Multicloud

Another significant challenge of multicloud is data management. Databases have been among the pioneers of distributed computing architectures due to their need to autoscale with great performance and quick recovery from failures. But handling data on multi-cloud is complicated. To manage data and logic placement across multi-cloud distributed architectures, the multi-cloud control plane needs to be able to answer the question, ‘Under which conditions do I put a specific distributed workload (data/logic) on a specific part of a distributed architecture?’

In the case of core/fog/edge IoT architecture, the issue is how to intelligently and dynamically choose and shift where logic is computed (i.e., in the core [cloud], in the fog [nodes], on the edge [devices]), and how to minimize data in motion. Do I move the logic to the data or the data to the logic? Such decisions require detailed analysis of many complex variables beyond just cost. The relationship between logic and data is essential in order to implement an efficient application.

The old model of generic databases loses ground to purpose built databases. In the multi-cloud context it is important to analyze how data will be used. Implementing a large scale warehouse database or data lake strategy is common but unless the correlation between applications and how data is used by execution units is well understood, aggregating huge amounts of data in one logically centralized system will not be efficient.

By contrast, AWS Outpost can be used to create multi-clouds using a master slave paradigm, in which AWS is the master and the customer clouds are akin to satellites. These outposts will become extensions of the AWS cloud, managed by AWS but belonging to customers. This strategy may succeed if the hardware and software architecture used by Outpost is superior in multiple ways.

Multi-cloud is the pinnacle of hyper-distributed cloud computing and will take several innovation cycles to get it right. It is worth noting that there are several startups building multi-cloud platforms.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is an intermediate step in cloud evolution and is a recognition of the fact that public clouds are not the solution for everything. The main reason for the proliferation of public cloud is not technology but a business proposition. Utility computing on one side alleviates the need for enterprises to build data centers. It also provides individual programmers the access to large scale computing resources without the need to own them. Enterprises, however, want to own and control their data exclusively. Most do not fully trust cloud providers.

AWS has partnered with Vmware to support private cloud. The partnership is mutually advantageous allowing Vmware customers to move easier to AWS without giving up VSphere technology and it will enable AWS to get a more significant footprint into enterprise data centers.

Microsoft’s priority is to preserve their current enterprise presence and entice their customers to choose Azure. Azure Stack for private cloud is a mirror of Azure for enterprise data centers. Microsoft is providing a convenient way of transition to Azure while keeping desired applications on private cloud. It is a natural hybrid cloud solution. Azure currently offers competitive pricing at the moment.

After the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM “has thrown the hat in the ring” of hybrid cloud business. It remains to be seen how this acquisition will play out and what the long term strategy for public cloud will be. No doubt, that IBM wants to be a major player in hybrid cloud.

Edge Computing

Data gravity is, for edge computing applications, an essential requirement and it does not make sense to waste time transferring large amounts of data to a public cloud when it is more efficient to process locally. Edge computing is the most relevant incarnation of private cloud.

Hybrid cloud gives enterprise players an opportunity to try out cloud applications in a safe environment. It will be interesting to see how Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc will make this transition.

The success of hybrid cloud may very will be decided by economic reasons. If public cloud becomes a commodity then hybrid cloud will just be a transition to multi-cloud.

Do you agree or disagree with our take on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud? We would love your input. Email us at tiffinewang@gmail.com. Next, we will be discussing Part 3: Serverless & Containers.