Hybrid Cloud

Last Updated: 2023-02-15

You may have seen buzzwords like hybrid cloud / private cloud / super cloud / meta cloud / distributed cloud, they are all trying to describe the next evolution of cloud computing: instead of using one single public cloud, your computing need is fulfilled by a mix of the following options.

• Public clouds: AWS, GCP, Azure.
• Edges
  • Customer Edge: Customer’s site – retail store, hotel, stadium, factory, industrial site.
  • Telco Edge: Telco network edge locations – regional, metro, or cell site.
  • Cloud Edge: Cloud provider PoP or edge location – owned and managed by cloud provider.
• Private on-prem data center.
• Disconnected: e.g. cruise ships.

Sovereignty

Public sector: military, law enforcement, infrastructure, public transit, public education, along with health care and those working for the government itself, such as elected officials.

Products:

• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty
• Google: Sovereign Controls for its Workspace

Public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) are investing in hybrid cloud offerings to meet the sovereignty requirements (in the increasing order):

• Data Sovereignty: data is stored and processed in a given region / sovereign boundary.
• Operational Sovereignty: Data Sovereignty + a seperate cloud instance managed by partners.
• Software Sovereignty: Operational Sovereignty + run in on-prem data centers disconnected from the cloud provider.

Example requirements: French "Trusted Cloud".

Products / Services:

AWS

AWS Outposts, EKS Anywhere

GCP

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC): Anthos evolved (or rebranded ...)

Read More: GCP

Azure

Azure Arc (software, management, monitoring, etc) + Stack (hardware, k8s, VMs, etc)

IBM / RedHat

OpenShift

• basically an opinionated version of Kubernetes from RedHat.
• expanded to VMs by investing heavily in OpenShift Virtualization (Kubevirt).

Virtualization

• VMWare:
  • vSphere / vCenter / vCloud Director
  • expanded to containers with Tanzu
• Nutanix

Hardware

Utility-priced systems:

• HPE: Greenlake
• Dell: Apex
• Lenovo: TrueScale
• Cisco Systems: Hyperflex and X-Series and Intersight

Storage:

• Pure Storage (all-flash storage)
• Netapp

Networking:

• Cisco