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Practicalities of the ‘new’ hybrid

One thing that will become clearer next year is the practicalities of operating new hybrid clouds such as those being touted by Microsoft and Oracle.

Already, Microsoft has been forced to rejig the go-to-market for Azure Stack, offering it only on a small set of appliances rather than – as it was originally intended – allowing customers to run it on hardware of their choice.

Microsoft said in a blog post back in July that the reason for its change of mind was over concerns that it couldn’t guarantee Azure Stack wouldn’t play nicely with Azure if it had no control over what Azure Stack was running on.

By “co-engineering” appliances with a handful of vendors, Microsoft believes it can better ensure that the hybrid experience is seamless between the bits of Azure that customers run in-house and the bits they buy from the public cloud.

AWS is keen to highlight the uncertainty of how new hybrid cloud models will work in practice.

“When you do feature updates in public cloud, customers can take advantage of the new services immediately,” Gore said.

“As there is a bit of a shift to bring the cloud into the corporate data centre, how do you get the advantage of new innovations and technologies that are constantly being pumped out [on the public cloud side]?

“If you go down the path of bringing this into your data centre, you’re going to end up stuck in versions of infrastructural technologies that you deployed at that point in time.

“How do you solve that when you’re bringing it into your data centre again? I think that’s the real challenge."

Those in the market are staying optimistic that the new hybrid models will work.

“In the next 12 months I think this space will really light up,” Microsoft's Bowers said.

“We’re really excited about the offerings we’re going to bring to market.”