Looking back on 2018, we’ve seen a remarkable focus on enterprise hybrid cloud adoption. Enterprise IT cloud architects will find this as no surprise, but others might have thought we’d be a little further along in public cloud adoption. The rise of public cloud is clear—getting the resources you need quickly and only for the time period you need them is incredibly compelling.
According to a 2018 IDG Cloud Computing Survey, “Organizations are utilizing a mix of cloud delivery models. Currently[,] the average environment is 53% non-cloud, 23% SaaS, 16% IaaS and 9% PaaS; however, [the average environment] will evolve to only 31% non-cloud within 18 months.”
In spite of this research into rising cloud adoption, it might not be happening as fast as you think. Increasingly, hybrid cloud adoption, which means not going “all in” to the public cloud but mixing it with private clouds and data centers, has been strategically better for many medium and large enterprises. Many of them run 50% or more of their key workloads on premises in their data centers. IT cloud architects know from experience that moving some workloads to the public cloud has caused more headaches than expected and have even repatriated them back to private clouds on premises.
Hybrid cloud is here to stay as the titans of IT get in on the action.
Hybrid Cloud Highlights from IT Titans
These are just some of the big events from the last half of 2018 that show how technology titans are responding to the need for hybrid cloud strategies within enterprises:
Jun 4, 2018—Microsoft Buys Github
At first, the connection specifically to hybrid cloud might not jump out until you think about the culture of the DevOps community and how Microsoft wants to be more open-source and developer friendly. Hybrid cloud adoption requires strategic architecting with more modern DevOps approaches.
This $7.5 billion acquisition gives Microsoft more street cred as they get more open-source friendly. Windows Server 2019 will now have an SSH client to play friendly with all the DevOps teams who are more used to that from years of using open-source, Linux-based operating systems. For more information, see Windows Server 2019 Includes OpenSSH.
July 24, 2018—Google Goes “All-In” Hybrid Cloud
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) went “all-in” on hybrid cloud by announcing their support at the Google Next 2018 conference last summer. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) On Prem helps enterprises manage Kubernetes clusters anywhere. We captured highlights attending this conference in CloudBolt’s Google Next 2018 Roundup:
“Google released Cloud Functions, as a serverless platform to be on par with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions and updated Cloud Build, their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to build and test applications in the cloud.”
October 28, 2018—IBM buys Red Hat
Similar to the Github acquisition, this confirms, at least in appearance, a more DevOps-friendly portfolio for IBM. Not similar, though, was the cost which was $34 million! This is one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time.
In our own blog post on the subject, we described how the investment confirms how enterprise hybrid cloud strategies will dominate IT initiatives and that IBM needs to leverage partnerships:
“IBM has a huge vendor footprint in the largest enterprises across the globe while Red Hat has well-established technology partnerships with all the major public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and more, in addition to the IBM Cloud.”
November 28, 2018—Amazon Announces AWS Outposts
At one of the largest conferences for IT in Las Vegas, AWS reinforced their hybrid cloud story at AWS re:Invent 2018. Live on a stage to tens of thousands of attendees and hundreds of thousands of others streaming online, CEO Andy Jassy announced one new service after another. The main hybrid cloud announcement was for AWS Outpost that brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Here’s our AWS re:Invent 2018 Roundup:
“We are pleased to have attended AWS re:Invent this year, which reinforces our story of being relentlessly customer focused as they consider public cloud offerings from not only AWS who is leading the pack but also cross any public cloud or private cloud offerings as well as integrate with best-practice configuration and IT tools.” —Brian Kelly, CloudBolt CEO
December 11, 2018—Oracle Cloud Introduces Native Cloud Framework
Just last week at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Seattle, WA, Oracle announced its Cloud Native Framework to get in on the hybrid cloud action and pitch to its enterprise customers. In the following press release, Oracle Arms Developers with the Most Comprehensive Cloud Native Framework, Oracle introduces their offering:
“To further enable developers to build and deploy modern applications, Oracle is introducing a rich set of first class [sic] Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services built on Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud IaaS and existing foundational Kubernetes orchestration and management layer, the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). “
CloudBolt and Hybrid Cloud
CloudBolt is purpose-built for enterprise hybrid cloud strategies. Using a single platform to manage the connections and complexity of configuration and deployment, DevOps engineers can obtain and consume any IT resources they need that span data centers, private clouds, and public clouds.
As we wrap up 2018 at CloudBolt we wish you a great holiday season and happy new year!
