The Evolving Hybrid Cloud

In the past few years, the major cloud providers have invested in products intended to promote the hybrid cloud approach. Think Google Anthos, Azure Arc, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere.

The result of this investment has been a change in how enterprises manage workloads, with enterprises worrying less about where compute happens as they focus more on where data resides for workloads.

This makes sense since data has weight and is both expensive and time-consuming to move. If you’re only in one cloud, you only have to park your data there. Spread that data on-premises and in the cloud—or across multiple clouds—and moving data becomes a much more expensive pill to swallow.

Beyond cost savings, utilizing a cloud provider’s hybrid products allows for greater flexibility in where workloads happen. Large workloads that require substantial network throughput, for example, can occur on-premises. 

They also open the door for enterprises to adopt the edge, since remote locations can be treated as just another cloud provider in your hybrid stack.

Open-source solutions

Another benefit of the hybrid cloud approach is the array of tools available. 

As with any platform, each of the major cloud providers—and their hybrid products—have its own strengths and weaknesses, and enterprises looking to avoid any sort of lock-in can instead leverage a number of open-source technologies.

Some solutions we often recommend are Terraform, SUSE Rancher, HashiCorp’s toolsets, and Red Hat OpenShift—solutions that are portable, open, and platform agnostic.

Sharing is caring

For even greater flexibility, some enterprises are exploring the idea of no copy data sharing via Blockchain.