Hybrid Cloud Computing Redefined Around Multicloud, Kubernetes, Anthos, More
… easy to unify hybrid cloud workloads. (As a side note, I’m not sure Anthos counts as a Kubernetes distribution, exactly, but it’s close to it.)
3. Azure Stack and AWS Outposts. Anthos is Google Cloud’s answer to similar hybrid cloud frameworks released by the other two Big Three clouds: Azure Stack and AWS Outposts.
The latter two frameworks are different from Anthos in many key respects. They are tied to specific cloud platforms (specifically, Azure and AWS), whereas Anthos can work with any public cloud. Azure Stack and Outposts also require certain types of hardware for building the on-premises components of hybrid clouds.
Still, like Anthos, Azure Stack and Outposts – all three of which became available just in the past few years – greatly simplify the effort required to build a hybrid cloud. Today, one can seamlessly integrate on-premises and cloud-based resources using a consistent set of APIs and management tools.
The Modern Definition
All of these changes have redefined the meaning of hybrid cloud.
Today’s hybrid clouds are characterized by much tighter integration between on-premises and cloud-based services. From the perspective of applications, there is often no difference at all. That’s because the applications use the same APIs no matter where they run within a hybrid cloud. Developers and IT teams can use the same deployment and management interfaces for all parts of their hybrid clouds.
In short, the bar is now much higher for hybrid cloud architectures than it was several years ago. Gone are the days when you could plausibly claim to have a hybrid cloud simply by running some VMs in a public cloud and storing some data for them on premises.
Modern hybrid clouds are built around infrastructure-agnostic development and deployment techniques, and they often rely on sophisticated architectural platforms, like Anthos or Azure Stack, that simply did not exist until the recent past.
Christopher Tozzi’s work as a freelance writer in the channel dates back to 2008, with an emphasis on open source, Linux, virtualization, SDN, containers, data storage and related topics. He also teaches history at a major university in the Albany, New York, area, Tozzi occasionally combines these interests by writing about the history of software. He wrote a book, “For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution.”
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