Right now, most cloud discussions (including many on our site) revolve around private versus public deployments. However, a hybrid approach is also gaining ground, and analysts say it will be the ideal way one day to leverage cloud technologies.
David Linthicum, CTO and founder of the cloud consulting firm Blue Mountain Labs, recently told me that a lot of what is being called "hybrid" is actually missing the mark. Companies, particularly large ones, are finding use for public and private cloud models, but the models are not interconnected, and resources are not shared. They essentially serve separate functions within the companies utilizing them.
"You do not see much hybrid cloud computing out there today." That means "being able to move data between instances that you control within your own private cloud and instances of the public cloud," he said. "This model, when leveraged correctly, is the ideal solution."
According to Linthicum, a true hybrid model offers almost unlimited scalability, security, data privacy, and cost efficiency.
This hybrid flexibility is still lacking among current deployments, but he is optimistic, despite strong pushes toward public services from cloud giants. Amazon has been adamant in campaigning against the private cloud approach, but Linthicum said that if Amazon, the "800-pound gorilla" in IaaS, were to offer a solid hybrid approach, it would utilize Eucalyptus, which is widely considered the most AWS-friendly cloud management platform.
Eucalyptus calls its offering "open source software for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds" on its website. "Eucalyptus recognizes that successful private and hybrid clouds often depend upon an ecosystem of solutions working together, and Eucalyptus has built this ecosystem with its partner programs."
Linthicum said the main obstacles to hybrid setups right now are their cost and complexity.
You have security models spanning outside and inside the enterprise. You have integration that needs to occur. You also have two different platforms running similar data. It is a complex, distributed system that exists between infrastructure that you own and infrastructure that you don't own.
However, the hybrid approach really offers the best of both worlds. When deployed properly, it counters common objections like vendor lockin, compliance issues, and the location of data.
We can hope more companies will offer sound hybrid approaches as the integration between private and public cloud platforms takes center stage this year.
That NEC workload factoring model is fascinating! The underlying logic to route jobs based on data content and resource availability sounds complicated to set up, but it's just a matter of time before it's packaged into a wizard-driven application. Thanks for these links!
Roy Rasmussen 1/30/2013 2:05:27 AM User Rank Blogger
Re: Hybrid Model Delivers Best Cloud
Here's one example of that type of approach. In this example the architecture uses the cloud to handle transient load spikes segregated from the application platform's standard workload.
This article also has some interesting points relevant to the discussion.
@Michael definitely not anytime soon. It can still be a hastle just to switch vendors let alone utilize multiple vendors in one distributed hybrid cloud systems. You are right, until there are widely adopted standards it's not likely to materialize, and that is likely still years away.
I'd like to hear more about the kind of segregation you're advocating, Roy. I understand the value from a securit and compliance perspective, but where are the segregated workloads running and how do they leverage cloud functionality?
I think that's the holy grail of cloud computing, Chris, but I don't think we'll see it very soon. You can find gateways that will replicate across different cloud services, and even some providers that don't mind sharing, but the proprietary formats and lack of standards is going to make this supremely difficult in the near-term.
Do you think we'll see real interoperability solutions hitting the market soon?
Roy Rasmussen 1/29/2013 4:24:59 AM User Rank Blogger
Re: Hybrid Model Delivers Best Cloud
Yes, someone pointed out to me the other day that a poorly-managed cloud can threaten to deteriorate into what he called "the bad old days of time-sharing." Of course that's the worst-case side of the story, not the whole picture of the topic under discussion. More positively, I think cloud data segregation can be useful for some applications such as workload delegation, security, and compliance. By the way I'm not suggesting either type of hybrid model is "better" than the other, I was just observing that I haven't seen equal discussion given to both models of hybrids, so I find this article opens up some new ideas.
Developing a true hybrid cloud mixing public and private cloud resources is an interesting concept that sounds incredibly complex, but it's encouraging to see solutions like Eucalyptus to help us along.
Could we take things one step further, especially where burst computing is concerned and utilize cloud resources from multiple cloud vendors? Companies could scale their cloud computing resources across multiple vendors depending on cost or other factors.
I would think that when there are segregated roles, instead of integration between the clouds, why use different models at all? There would be less of a benefit. Also, if one cloud goes down and there is no integration within the enterprise, there would seem more of a chance of the entire business going down or having a long-term outag no? Unless there are segregated and separate clouds backing up the same data.
That's a good observation, Roy, but if you're not sharing data, the ability to 'burst' compute jobs and shift workloads around dynamically is even more complicated, isn't it?
When things are kept segregated, do companies benefit less from cloud environments?
Roy Rasmussen 1/28/2013 4:40:47 PM User Rank Blogger
Re: Hybrid Model Delivers Best Cloud
"Companies, particularly large ones, are finding use for public and private cloud models, but the models are not interconnected, and resources are not shared." Interesting distinction Linthicum draws here between different concepts of "hybrid" clouds. I think I've seen more discussions of hybrids where data is segregated rather than shared. Seems like if you're sharing it, the challenge for optimization shifts to areas like bandwidth, syncing, and backup.
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