I have recently heard from a number of cloud service providers (CSP) telling me about their support for a “hybrid” cloud. What is the hybrid cloud and why is it important? What enterprise customers are looking for is a “Standard IT” that would allow them to deploy their applications flexibly wherever is best. The Hybrid Cloud concept goes some way towards this.
There is still some confusion about the terminology that surrounds cloud computing and so let us go back to basics. The generally accepted definition of cloud terminology is in NIST SP-800-145. According to this there are three service models and four deployment models. The service models being IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The four deployment models for cloud computing are: Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Community Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. So “Hybrid” is related to the way cloud services are deployed. The NIST definition of the Hybrid Cloud is:
“The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).”
However sometimes Hybrid is used to describe a cloud strategy – meaning that the organization using the cloud will use cloud services for some kinds of application but not for others. This is a perfectly reasonable strategy but not quite in line with the above definition. So I refer to this as a Hybrid Cloud Strategy.
In fact this leads us on to the reality for most enterprises is that the cloud is just another way of obtaining some of their IT services. Cloud services may be the ideal solution for development because of the speed with which they can be obtained. They may be good for customer interaction services because of their scalability. They may be the best way to perform data analytics needing the occasional burst of very high performance computing. Hence, to the enterprise, the cloud becomes another added complexity in their already complex IT environment.
So the CSPs have recognised that in order to tempt the enterprises to use their cloud services they need recognise this complexity challenge that enterprises face and provide help to solve it. So the “Hybrid” cloud that will be attractive to enterprises needs to:
* Enable the customer to easily migrate some parts of their workload and data to a cloud service. This is because there may be some data that is required to remain on premise for compliance or audit reasons.
* Orchestrate the end to end processing which may involve on premise as well as services from other cloud providers.
* Allow the customer to assure the end to end security and compliance for their workload.
When you look at these requirements it becomes clear that standards are going to be a key component to allow this degree of flexibility and interoperability. The standards needed go beyond the support for Hypervisors, Operating Systems, Databases and middleware to include the
deployment, management and security of workloads in a common way across on premise and cloud deployments as well as between cloud services from different vendors.
There is no clear winner in the standards yet – although OpenStack has wide support including from IBM, HP and Rackspace – but one of the challenges is that vendors offer versions of this with their own proprietary additions. Other important vendors have their own proprietary offerings that they would like customers to adopt including AWS, Microsoft and VMWare. So the game is not over yet, but the industry should recognize that the real requirement is for a “Standard IT” that can easily be deployed in whatever way is most appropriate at any given time.