Authored by Tarun Dua Managing Director and Co-Founder, E2E Networks
Hybrid multi-cloud approach is to use on-premise environment with multi-cloud environment utilizing one or more public cloud platforms along with an on-premise compute setup. In today’s rapidly changing IT environment, enterprises find themselves operating a combination of multiple cloud platforms and on-premise infrastructure to run their compute workloads. According to MarketsandMarkets research, by 2023, the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow to $97.64 billion from $44.60 billion in 2018.
A hybrid cloud approach that uses private, public, and on-premise infrastructure necessitates unified visibility and control from a common control plane to utilize all compute assets efficiently.
According to RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report, 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy.
Open Source Software like terraform, kubernetes, istio, ceph, rancher, knative etc. is the modern tooling that is being adopted to make full use of hybrid multi-cloud compute paradigms.
Being a cloud agnostic platform since the inception, we at E2E Networks have made our public cloud platform easy to use for organizations in their hybrid multi-cloud setup. In our almost a decade of vast experience in helping organizations with various production workloads, we have seen the latency over the public Internet reduce drastically to be usable for extending the compute loads from on-premise locations seamlessly without having to rely on private links to the public cloud platforms.
We will see more open source software in the near future that can help in seamless management of assets on multiple public/private clouds, and on-premise infrastructure. An ideal scenario for a hybrid multi-cloud environment would be, the IT department places on-demand requests for resources and the software layer rapidly selects the best resource options and deploys across multiple clouds. Or when the data needs to be stored and managed adhering to specific compliance regime, the request can be programmed, and the software layer suggests the best case scenario for such deployments.
An on-premise compute deployment uses single tenanted assets for a single organization. Organizations can implement their own security and management policies. Also, it becomes easier to manage and apply data security policies to be compliant with regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS.
Newer on-premise deployments use modern tooling that provides public cloud like on-demand compute features like use of containers apart from virtualization which is now a standard.
The advantages of an on-premise compute deployment are limited by in-ability to scale rapidly. On-premise compute deployment usually can’t immediately get access to new hardware innovations in Compute/Storage/AI as rapidly as they are happening in the public cloud compute ecosystem. This is the case even if the newer features supporting newer innovations are available in the on-premise software platform, because there’s a lag between justifying the need for newer hardware and its procurement and deployment. Organizations need to have a certain scale to be able to afford an on-premise private cloud deployment and ability to hire, train and keep up to date a CloudOps team. In-house CloudOps teams can rarely analyse techno-commercial advantages with ROI of newer hardware and software innovations to apply to on-premise deployments.
Also, as we are in the second decade of cloud computing, more and more cloud enablers in Open Source world are emerging to provide modern tooling that make way for easy implementation of hybrid multi-cloud strategies.
Gartner predicts that, by 2020, less than 5% of enterprise workloads will be running in true on-premises private clouds. An indicator that hybrid cloud plays a key role in the cloud strategies across organizations.
Organizations can completely mitigate the risks related to implementation time and can retain the flexibility of pay as you go. Establishing connectivity between private and public cloud is seamless through the use of software defined networking (SDN) or via public Internet taking advantage of low latencies provided by modern fiber driven Internet.
