Hybrid Cloud 2.0

Almost two years ago Gartner and other analysts and market research companies predicted that nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017 – that's just two years from now (and it did not happen - note of Sept 2020). 

Only a year ago, the interest of a hybrid cloud solution was still very high: 

So, will it happen? Well it all depends on how we define hybrid cloud. Installing a cloud orchestrator may very well account for a hybrid cloud deployment – for some, and in that perspective I am sure it will happen. But of course the concept of hybrid cloud is much more than implementing the cloud orchestrator and by the way, the current technology is still not mature and thus not able to do much more than provisioning a virtual server from a few well-defined providers – at the best!

Interesting is also that the hybrid cloud vision and target capabilities for such solutions are also changing. A year ago we focused on the APIs that is needed to integrate across a large number of heterogeneous providers and enterprises with a cloud orchestrator in order to achieve the flexibility of moving discrete workloads across different providers. Today we are still not able to this, at the best we can do something similar with one or two providers, but not at any large scale. So, what is happening? Are we not seeing the APIs emerging that enable heterogeneous providers and enterprises integrate? No we are not – and a good reason is the emerging and strong drive of OpenStack:

OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. OpenStack works with popular enterprise and open source technologies making it ideal for heterogeneous infrastructure.

Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and helping them move faster. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem, and users seeking commercial support can choose from different OpenStack-powered products and services in the Marketplace.

The software is built by a thriving community of developers, in collaboration with users, and is designed in the open at our Summits.

Only this last year basically all the major cloud providers have issued OpenStack compliance statements or announced a strategy to achieve such compliancy within a short time.

In parallel the hybrid cloud vision is also changing, its no longer a target to only integrate heterogeneous providers and enterprises, but indeed to establish the capability of provisioning arbitrary resources from any OpenStack-based provider, but the ultimate goal is; not only consume resources, but also contribute resources to “any” other consumer!!

This is pretty ambitious, but none the less very interesting. This means that any enterprise that has invested and built their private cloud also can contribute resources to the “world” of hybrid cloud consumers. There are of course “small” issues like ability to invoice for the consumed resources. OpenStack whom predicted this “World Wide Cloud” vision, has already started the billing discussion that might also include resources like applications - so maybe enterprises will have a new business opportunity as SaaS providers…