The cloud is now firmly established as an essential element of a digital-first strategy and will become the primary accelerator of innovation, IDC stated late last year. The increased pace of digital transformation triggered by the global pandemic has indeed stimulated public cloud adoption, and organisations are relying less and less on their on-premises infrastructure and privately owned datacentres.
But one cloud won’t fit all.
IT strategy needs to consider the ‘best fit’ for each individual workload. Cost is only one factor, and business agility gained from using services such as artificial intelligence or machine learning, and improved time to market from rapid application development, are just as important criteria today.
With remote work becoming more the norm than the exception, organisations increasingly need to deliver advanced digital services to a range of locations. As such, it’s no surprise that IDC forecasts that worldwide spending on edge computing will be US$176 billion in 2022, which will require the integration of physical and digital infrastructure.
Applications drive infrastructure selection
Cloud-native application development technologies such as containerisation and microservices, previously considered tools for start-up and consumer-focused companies such as Netflix and Spotify, are becoming mainstream in enterprise IT today. Additionally, new applications developed inhouse are taking advantage of the agile DevOps approach with continuous integration and deployment.
But modernising existing applications comes with all sorts of challenges. A simple ‘lift and shift’ transition to public clouds without rewriting apps won’t unlock agile cloud-native platform capabilities. Additionally, refactoring traditional applications to the cloud can be costly and difficult to justify if there are no obvious tangible business benefits to be had. Moreover, a large group of applications still demand single-tenanted private infrastructure due to performance, regulatory compliance or data governance reasons.
When applications cannot go to public clouds, an on premises solution becomes the logical alternative. As a result, cloud-native development tools are fast becoming available for private and even bare metal environments. Amazon Web Services probably marked the dawn of this era of hybrid development when its container and Kubernetes services was made available for any platform.
However, a significant part of digital infrastructure remains in private environments, as highlighted in a recent Flexera report, which showed that 80 per cent of enterprises are implementing a hybrid cloud strategy.
Managing your hybrid infrastructure
Diversifying across multiple clouds is another de-risking strategy to avoid vendor lock-in, although it brings different challenges. Organisations need centralised management and standardised sets of technologies working consistently across a distributed environment to reduce operational costs and complexity. To address this, public cloud providers have responded with their own hybrid management solutions such as Google’s Anthos and Microsoft’s Azure Arc.
Additionally, infrastructure-as-code has become the new mantra for the automation of configuration management and cross-platform tools, with HashiCorp’s Terraform and Ansible rapidly emerging as de-facto industry standards. At the same time Kubernetes, supported by all the major cloud providers, has become the mainstream containerised application management tool, while software defined hyperconverged infrastructure management vendors like Nutanix and VMWare have successfully pivoted from providing pure on-premises solutions to hybrid solutions that embrace public clouds.
Cloudification of hardware
Private clouds are not just about virtualising computer and storage resources anymore. Sharing and even oversubscribing the same piece of hardware across many applications is something the public clouds do well with economies of scale.
Applications that don’t fit this model will demand bare metal, which are dedicated hardware resources that can achieve the highest level of performance, isolation and security. Bare metal is far from simply being a piece of tin. Software defined provisioning, automation and broad support of integration APIs, hybrid configuration tools fitting into a DevOps CI/CD pipeline are all fundamental requirements, and pay-per-use commercial models with on-demand flexible capacity are key purchasing considerations.
Hyperscale cloud providers have acknowledged this demand with the release of Microsoft Azure Stack, AWS Outpost, IBM Cloud Satellite and Oracle Cloud@Customer as private pieces of their global clouds. Traditional technology vendors have also innovated with a range of ‘as-a-service’ models to deliver flexible hardware capacity on-demand, available direct from the manufacturer to address global supply-chain delays.
Close proximity to public clouds is essential, hence the advent of sovereign private solutions like NetApp Keystone, Dell APEX, HPE Greenlake and the Pure Storage as-a-service, which are deployed in key Equinix locations globally, ready for customers.
Cloud-adjacent digital core hubs
Digital infrastructure company Equinix enables enterprises to integrate all these hybrid technology solutions, from edge to cloud, in global core hub locations that have rich interconnection options to a broad choice of public and private clouds, networks and digital ecosystems.
When enterprises move their current on-premises presence into multi-tenanted locations, they immediately create a strategic digital core of hybrid architecture to serve as a long-term foundation that can support new capabilities and applications, and importantly drive greater business agility.
