Azure Stack, AWS Outposts Poised to Impact Colocation
… it may be difficult to deploy and manage, especially for organizations without extensive in-house Kubernetes expertise.
Bridging the Gap
Still, these hybrid solutions open vast new opportunities for bridging the gap that has traditionally separated public cloud from colocation data centers. As long as your colocation provider meets any applicable hardware requirements, and you are comfortable managing the software side of things on your own if necessary (or hire a channel partner for that), these frameworks make it very easy to deploy public cloud services, like AWS S3 storage or Azure Virtual Machines, on servers in a colocation center.
At the same time, these hybrid cloud solutions provide access to a broad range of public cloud services. They support not just the bread-and-butter IaaS compute and storage services, but also serverless functions, databases, and even PaaS-like software delivery platforms built into public clouds. They also typically cost the same or less than you would pay to access the same services directly within a public cloud. That means that total cost of ownership, even after you factor in colocation pricing, could be less for users of a hybrid cloud framework within a colocation center than it would be if you used only a public cloud, or just a colocation solution.
This is all a big deal, especially because earlier generations of hybrid cloud solutions from the public cloud vendors did not offer this kind of compatibility or broad functionality. Frameworks like Windows Azure Pack (which debuted in 2013), the main predecessor to Azure Stack, supported only a handful of public cloud services and never gained large followings.
Meanwhile, the solutions that colo providers themselves offered for interfacing with public cloud services within their data centers, like Equinix’s Starter Kit for Microsoft Azure (introduced in 2014), came with added costs, were cumbersome to deploy, and were designed for only a subset of hybrid cloud use cases.
Conclusion
What the introduction of hybrid cloud platforms like Azure Stack and AWS Outposts will ultimately mean for the colocation industry remains to be seen. They are only a few years old, so it’s not clear how quickly colocation customers are adopting them.
What is clear is that in 2020 it no longer makes a lot of sense to think about the public cloud and colocation data centers in oppositional terms. A new generation of hybrid cloud frameworks has introduced a level of integration between public cloud and colocation that was difficult to envision just a few years ago.
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