New to distributed cloud? Watch the on-demand virtual event featuring industry leaders and a special guest.
As a technical offering manager with IBM Cloud, I find that it helps to establish common-ground with customers by understanding where they are in their cloud journey. In this post, let’s review the most common cloud-computing architectures:
In my view, hybrid cloud is your choice if you want to move to a cloud native, cloud-based architecture without abandoning your existing applications. Essentially, maintaining legacy apps on-premises while taking advantage of the cloud to experiment on new applications. A simple use-case of hybrid cloud is exposing high-value assets that run on-premises to the cloud by using application programming interfaces (APIs).
The core benefits of using hybrid cloud include the following features:
Multicloud allows you to spread your applications to several cloud environments and use more than one vendor. Here’s why multicloud can help you.
Say you’re an executive at a delivery company needing to scale for an increase in orders. You want to achieve this objective while also carrying out the following tasks:
With multicloud, you can access multiple clouds and multiple data centers worldwide to accomplish all these activities. You gain availability and can do more workloads than hybrid cloud.
Consider multicloud to be a subset of hybrid cloud. At the same time, you can potentially use a hybrid cloud as one of its multiple cloud environments.
Multicloud also combats shadow IT, where certain employees prefer to work in a different cloud than what the enterprise uses. Shadow IT leads to a company adopting multiple clouds without overall guidance coming from the top level of leadership. Multicloud gives you better visibility and governance over shadow IT than hybrid cloud.
Gartner recently published a paper that said distributed cloud fixes what hybrid cloud breaks. I would argue that distributed cloud also fixes what multicloud breaks.
Let’s take Kubernetes as an example. All major cloud providers support their own managed Kubernetes service, but the underlying technology is all essentially the same open source project. But, if you want to create a Kubernetes cluster with more than one vendor, you can encounter differences in the following areas:
If you use the latest versioning on IBM Cloud — which some of your other cloud providers don’t support — it may results in inconsistencies that your ops team will struggle to handle.
Some multicloud management solutions claim to have a single control pane to address this challenge. The truth is that these platforms allow you to control the operations of your Kubernetes clusters, but not fully manage the operations specific to the cloud provider where your cluster runs. For tasks such as changing access roles or security constraints, you’ll have to navigate to the individual ops dashboards of the various cloud providers.
In contrast, with distributed cloud, you can continue to use multicloud environments and access resources no matter where they’re located — all within a single control plane on one cloud.
You can use distributed cloud for multiple tasks, including the following activities:
The following major advantages come through using distributed cloud:
Additionally, distributed cloud can be used for other services beyond Kubernetes, including Red Hat OpenShift and serverless platforms.
Learn more about distributed cloud by reading “Understanding Distributed Cloud Architecture: The Basics.”
In the second part of this blog, I discuss how distributed cloud works with edge computing.
Learn more about IBM’s version of distributed cloud called IBM Cloud Satellite.