I said last year that I don’t do future prediction type posts, and then I did one anyway. This year I said the same thing and then I did one around some Primary Data commentary. Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing, so here we are again. This time around, my good buddy Jason Collier (Founder at Scale Computing) had some stuff to say about hybrid cloud, and I thought I’d wade in and, ostensibly, nod my head in vigorous agreement for the most part. Firstly, though, here’s Jason’s quote:

“Throughout 2017 we have seen many organizations focus on implementing a 100% cloud focused model and there has been a push for complete adoption of the cloud. There has been a debate around on-premises and cloud, especially when it comes to security, performance and availability, with arguments both for and against. But the reality is that the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle. In 2018 and beyond, the future is all about simplifying hybrid IT. The reality is it’s not on-premises versus the cloud. It’s on-premises and the cloud. Using hyperconverged solutions to support remote and branch locations and making the edge more intelligent, in conjunction with a hybrid cloud model, organizations will be able to support highly changing application environments”.

 

The Cloud

I talk to people every day in my day job about what their cloud strategy is, and most people in enterprise environments are telling me that there are plans afoot to go all in on public cloud. No one wants to run their own data centres anymore. No one wants to own and operate their own infrastructure. I’ve been hearing this for the last five years too, and have possibly penned a few strategy documents in my time that said something similar. Whether it’s with AWS, Azure, Google or one of the smaller players, public cloud as a consumption model has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get stuff working up there reliably. Why? Because no-one wants to spend time “re-factoring” their applications. As a result of this, a lot of people want to lift and shift their workloads to public cloud. This is fine in theory, but a lot of those applications are running crusty versions of Microsoft’s flagship RDBMS, or they’re using applications that are designed for low-latency, on-premises data centres, rather than being addressable over the Internet. And why is this? Because we all spent a lot of the business’s money in the late nineties and early noughties building these systems to a level of performance and resilience that we thought people wanted. Except we didn’t explain ourselves terribly well, and now the business is tired of spending all of this money on IT. And they’re tired of having to go through extensive testing cycles every time they need to do a minor upgrade. So they stop doing those upgrades, and after some time passes, you find that a bunch of key business applications are suddenly approaching end of life and in need of some serious TLC. As a result of this, those same enterprises looking to go cloud first also find themselves struggling mightily to get there. This doesn’t mean public cloud isn’t necessarily the answer, it just means that people need to think things through a bit.

 

The Edge

Another reason enterprises aren’t necessarily lifting and shifting every single workload to the cloud is the concept of data gravity. Sometimes, your applications and your data need to be close to each other. And sometimes that closeness needs to occur closest to the place you generate the data (or run the applications). Whilst I think we’re seeing a shift in the deployment of corporate workloads to off-premises data centres, there are still some applications that need everything close by. I generally see this with enterprises working with extremely large datasets (think geo-spatial stuff or perhaps media and entertainment companies) that struggle to move large amounts of the data around in a fashion that is cost effective and efficient from a time and resource perspective. There are some neat solutions to some of these requirements, such as Scale Computing’s single node deployment option for edge workloads, and X-IO Technologies‘ neat approach to moving data from the edge to the core. But physics is still physics.

 

The Bit In Between

So back to Jason’s comment on hybrid cloud being the way it’s really all going. I agree that it’s very much a question of public cloud and on-premises, rather than one or the other. I think the missing piece for a lot of organisations, however, doesn’t necessarily lie in any one technology or application architecture. Rather, I think the key to a successful hybrid strategy sits squarely with the capability of the organization to provide consistent governance throughout the stack. In my opinion, it’s more about people understanding the value of what their company does, and the best way to help it achieve that value, than it is about whether HCI is a better fit than traditional rackmount servers connected to fibre channel fabrics. Those considerations are important, of course, but I don’t think they have the same impact on a company’s potential success as the people and politics does. You can have some super awesome bits of technology powering your company, but if you don’t understand how you’re helping the company do business, you’ll find the technology is not as useful as you hoped it would be. You can talk all you want about hybrid (and you should, it’s a solid strategy) but if you don’t understand why you’re doing what you do, it’s not going to be as effective.