In some of the recent projects I managed I find my self explaining to customers the basics of SDDC, cloud computing approaches and especially the difference approaches of Private, Public and hybrid cloud.
Public, Private, Hybrid, it all seems like seems like empty words when you are trying to attach in the real world.
Trying to understand how to solve day-to-day use cases, customers miss the evolvement the IT industry had gone trough in the last years.
Most customers today have some virtualised assets in they’re IT, lots of them trust virtualization in production and test&dev environment, But the big picture here is they have standardise they’re IT infrastructure on software than hardware.
For many years compute was the only aspect of virtualization, today networking & security and storage are making their way in to complete the picture.
But what all of this has to do with SDDC and different cloud approaches ?
For many years customers had struggled on trying to understand IT costs, how much resources to they need to run they’re business more agile and meet the business needs.
These tree pillars were always bottlenecked by the IT hardware architecture and mad it hard to plan or run IT like a business.
The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing defined Cloud as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that are rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model have five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”
Customers couldn’t create cloud environment based on the old hardware approach because it lac the ability to create shared pools and on demand resources.
When virtualization came along customers started to have more and more flexible, agile and on demand environments there for we call them “Private Clouds”
Couple of vendors took the agile on demand data centre approach and created pooled resources that customers consume over the internet for external use or for burst resource need such as development environments etc…
We call this “Public Clouds” as they live outside of our organisation and the level of connectivity between them and the customer environment is very limited.
Then came the “Hybrid Cloud” model, it meant to give a bridge from the private to the public cloud allowing the customers to extend they’re private clouds to the public world and move back resources from the public world back to the private.
The hybrid cloud model allowed customers for the first time to really share resources between clouds, but how SDDC has to do with all that?
SDDC is the next generation of virtualization, it extends standard compute resources to virtual network,security and storage.
SDDC gives us a common infrastructure covering all IT aspects (Compute, Network, Storage) for both Private and Public cloud and enables seamless migration of loads between them.
With SDDC in place customers doesn’t need to “migrate” loads as the they seamlessly moved back and forth from private to public clouds and vice versa as if the were all in the same data center.
More important is that In the age of building hybrid cloud we need to consider a new term called “Hybridity”.
In cloud computing hybridity means that you can mix all kind of resources elements and technology between the Private and Public Clouds, it’s not infrastructure only anymore but also environments, applications and policies.
hybridity give us the ability to create flexible application configuration and security policies that moves together with they’re attached resource back and forth from one loud to another.
That way we can keep company policy and security guidelines when moving to a hybrid cloud approach.
Hybridity is enabled in couple of different ways:
- Attached to the platform / application only
- Covers all infrastructure and application elements.
When covering only platforms / application we still need to consider a migration phase of the element between clouds, this limits our agility and ability to supply strict SLA’s
When covering all infrastructure and application elements we get the real benefit of the hybrid cloud as all IT element are flexible and attached to every floating element.
To conclude, hybridity of all cloud elements is the new key future of hybrid cloud, it’s a must for enabling a real hybrid cloud environment and customers must look at it carefully when architecting their next generation architecture.
