Next Stop: The Heterogeneous Cloud

By Joe Kinsella, CloudHealth Technologies Founder and CTO

I came into the software world in the middle of the great operating system war, which pitted IBM, Microsoft, and other minor players against each other for dominance over the server operating system. The war left Microsoft and Windows NT/3.1 in control of the market, and everyone else relegated to niche players. The rest (as they say) is history (that is until Linux started to gain momentum in the mid-2000s).

For a while, I thought the cloud market would develop in a similar fashion to the server operating system market, with a few key vendors (i.e. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google) battling it out and one emerging as the dominant provider. However, I am now seeing a new reality: the heterogeneous cloud.

The Cloud Futures

Many cloud evangelists and analysts typically espouse one of the three prevailing visions for how the cloud market will evolve:

– Winner takes all – In this vision, a single cloud provider emerges as the dominant provider the majority of us use (i.e. the Windows of the cloud). While lesser clouds will still exist, their market share marginalizes them to targeted vertical markets.

– Brokered cloud – The brokered cloud envisions us moving workloads between multiple cloud providers to arbitrage the best price, performance and /or function. It predicts some level of homogeneity across clouds that allows companies to adopt two or more providers and seamlessly move between them as desired.

– Hybrid cloud – This future envisions organizations using private clouds for their always-on infrastructure with bursting / emerging workloads being pushed into the public cloud.

Good in Theory but not in Practice

As much as I can intellectualize the arguments for brokered clouds, I’ve never fully embraced them as the future of the cloud. The recent increase in diversity and differentiation as cloud providers have moved beyond AWS’s “IaaS functional specification” has made it even harder see a brokered future. For example, how does one broker a workload between AWS DynamoDB, Google Cloud Datastore and/or Microsoft DocumentDB? Even if these are high-level equivalents of each other, the switching cost of moving a workload between them makes it almost certainly logistically infeasible.

I will also confess to never having been a fan of the hybrid cloud for a simple reason: I don’t believe corporate IT can build and operate a cloud competitive with public providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This belief has only increased, as I’ve watched the incessant innovation from cloud providers in the last few years, contrasted with the lack of innovation from commercial and/or open source alternatives.

So for several years my instinct has been that the cloud will evolve like the operating system market: with a single winner.

An Alternative: The Heterogeneous Cloud

Now, there is another way in which the cloud can evolve: the heterogeneous cloud. A heterogeneous cloud allows an organization to combine the best-of-breed services from multiple cloud providers, accepting the vendor lock-in that comes with specific services in return for the benefit of their superior features. Unlike the brokered cloud model, it predicts the desire for arbitrage will be trumped by a desire for achieving an optimum and stable execution of a workload. But unlike winner takes all, it presumes the diversity of services being offered as providers move up the application stack will result in a differentiation of clouds at a service level that encourages us to embrace a multi-vendor solution.

Current Challenges

Heterogeneous cloud obstacles include:

– Data transfer costs – Adopting the best-of-breed services from multiple cloud providers will require moving data securely in and out of clouds. This movement will increase the network egress costs for organizations moving data out of clouds.

– Cross-cloud private networks – If an organization adopts more than one provider for IaaS compute services, it will be necessary for data to move securely between different networks on different clouds.

– Cloud management – The powerful benefits of cloud computing have come at a cost: our management systems have been unable to keep pace with the complexity of our cloud infrastructure. The heterogeneous cloud likely adds exponentially to the existing complexity gap.

While these may sound like daunting impediments, each has market movements that suggest solutions are imminent. Also, cloud management products and services have started to substantially commit themselves to the “complexity problem” of the cloud, streamlining the management of complex infrastructure and making possible the ability to support heterogeneous clouds.

Last Thoughts

The heterogeneous cloud is both exciting and daunting. The excitement is driven by the powerful potential of a best-of-breed approach to cloud services; the daunting part for me is the complexity that will come with this type of adoption. But if we can solve for the impediments preventing this future, in return we may receive great innovation, an increased ROI, and freedom of choice in selecting the right cloud services for our organization.

Joe Kinsella – CTO and Founder, CloudHealth Technologies

Joe Kinsella focuses on CloudHealth’s vision to help organizations realize the full potential of the cloud without having to sacrifice cost, performance, availability, or service levels. With more than 20 years of industry experience behind him, Joe sees CloudHealth bringing the cloud to the enterprise by enabling the next generation of IT service management for the cloud.