The Hybrid Multicloud War

Motivation - With all the noise on cloud adoption, the bulk of workloads still live in the on- premises datacenters at most of the enterprises worldwide. Why? any number of reasons, ranging from ongoing security or compliance concerns to difficulty in data migration. I have seen numbers like 80% of workloads and 80% of enterprise IT spending still focused behind the firewall (private cloud) with the rest going to public cloud. However, the trend is definitely towards embracing hybrid cloud and multicloud architectures.

The hybrid cloud model employs both on-premises and public cloud resources, orchestrating workloads between the two. Related to this is the multicloud approach, which uses two or more public cloud providers, allowing engineering teams to leverage both to address their specific needs, but typically steers clear of on-premise infrastructure or private clouds. Beginning at the end of 2018 and throughout 2019, several new services aimed specifically at customers with hybrid or multicloud architectures were released. We give a brief review below.

AWS Outpost - Traditionally, AWS has steered away from launching services to assist customers running and managing on-premises workloads. Instead, the cloud platform fostered a public-cloud-only approach and dedicated their resources toward helping businesses migrate to the public cloud. The concept of AWS Outpost (launched at re-Invent 2018), geared toward customers with hybrid cloud architectures, is rather simple. The service enables customers to use AWS compute and storage services (AWS EC2 and EBS) within their own data centers but with hardware provided by AWS. Hence quite AWS-centric still.

Microsoft Azure Arc - Microsoft Azure Arc allows customers to simplify the use of different environments by extending Azure management capabilities to any infrastructure, regardless of its location. By using Kubernetes, Azure Arc provides the ability to deploy and manage container-based applications. However, Azure Arc can also organize other types of resources, such as Windows and Linux services.

Google Anthos - With Google Cloud Anthos (announced last year), customers can take advantage of their existing on-premises or public cloud investments by allowing them to modernize their applications and run them anywhere. At its core, Anthos uses the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other existing GCP services to provide an easy hybrid pathway and familiar development experience for engineering teams already using Google Cloud. Anthos has extended support for Azure (AWS in future).

While Kubernetes is implemented in both, its use is optional in Azure Arc, which also supports edge computing environments that enable customers to deploy in any infrastructure. In Anthos, on the other hand, Kubernetes is a core part of the tool. It even goes as far as to provide additional tools for converting virtual and bare-metal workloads to containers. This enables them to run in Google Kubernetes Engine, and, therefore, on Anthos. It is a bold move by Google to gain enterprise mindshare. However, GCP has ways to go to match Azure's support infrastructure.

IBM /RedHat Openshift - IBM paid a hefty $34 billion to acquire RedHat and the key motivation was to address the hybrid multicloud world with an emphasis on openness in those environments.. Some workloads will always run in the datacenter, but others will run in the public cloud, whether with the big three or others, from Salesforce, Oracle to IBM. Foundation of that effort is the Openshift enterprise containers and Kubernetes platform. IBM claims that Openshift customers grew from about 1000 last year to more than 1700 now. The latest release Openshift 4.4 makes it easier for developers to monitor the platform and application workloads. It can also manage costs and resources used for apps across hybrid clouds.

Conclusion - Without proper planning, hybrid and multicloud strategies can prevent you from taking full advantage of public cloud benefits, such as price reductions based on volume or the ability to leverage most managed services.

The war is on and every vendor wants you to use their platform. So watch out!