New technologies help companies to transform organizations into digital organizations. Identifying the emerging cloud technologies and understanding their impact on the existing cloud landscape can help companies to become more successful.
While some companies do not have a formal cloud strategy in place, most companies are using at least a cloud technology such as SaaS, IaaS or PaaS – whether in a private, public or hybrid cloud.
Other companies follow a multi cloud strategy since it allows them to select different cloud services from different providers because some are better for certain tasks than others. For example, some cloud platforms specialize in large data transfers or have integrated machine learning capabilities.
Most popular cloud models are the hybrid and multi cloud as of today. Seeing the first benefits of cost savings and increased efficiencies, companies focus now more on agility, speed and time to market to enable digital business success.
The new cloud capabilities increase the deployment options. Companies want the benefits of the cloud in all of their IT systems with the increased offering of cloud service providers, customers can now decide on the technology, services, providers, locations, form factors and control.
Since the digitalization journey raises new considerations and expectations, companies are now looking into technical areas to improve their cloud landscape such as the distributed cloud, API-Centric SaaS, Cloudlets, Blockchain PaaS, Cloud Native, Site Reliability Engineering, Containers, Edge Computing and Service Mesh.
Distributed Cloud
While the cloud does not restrict locations, the most common cloud configuration is centralized. Companies respond to the evolving cloud technologies and business models.
The hybrid, multi cloud and edge environments are increasing and they set the stage for the distributed cloud.
The distributed cloud interconnects data and applications served from multiple geographic locations and shared among multiple systems in different locations. A decentralized cloud services offering has less distance between the service source and the service user. It brings resources closer to the use of services. This reduces the latency of data transmission and increases the performance of services and better redundancy.
The distributed cloud is based on centralized and decentralized services and ensures optimal use of network access and available transport bandwidth. The services can be accessed at different locations.
Distributed clouds can be structured in different ways. Hierarchical cloud concepts are often used for implementation. In this case services are provided via different cloud hierarchies such as a central cloud, multiple regional clouds and many edge clouds.
The central cloud provides all services and receives or sends data from regional clouds or edge clouds. Regional clouds perform proxy and caching functions and act as intermediaries between the core cloud and the edge cloud or offer services themselves. Edge clouds are placed as close as possible to the user and provide cloud services with minimal latency.
Caching plays an important role for a distributed cloud. Intelligent caching mechanisms are necessary to avoid having to reload data from a central core cloud for each request, but to keep the information close to the user. Caching is not just about caching data, but in some cases complete services. Caching must ensure that the frequently required data and services are actually stored directly in the edge area. In addition, the cached data in a hierarchical structure must constantly synchronize with regional and central cloud services to avoid inconsistencies.
Challenges
The challenge of a distributed cloud is caused by the usage of many different individual components and services. This creates a heterogeneous environment that must be well managed. The distributed cloud must ensure compatibility between services, networks and individual components. The heterogeneity can occur in heterogeneous hardware platforms, infrastructures, network technologies, connections, devices, software implementations and service providers.
Advantages
Cloud providers use the distributed cloud model to bring their cloud services to the user with higher performance, better availability and lower latency. By using a distributed architecture, services can also scale better and adapt to user needs. Both the performance of the network and the service itself are well scalable. The fact that less data needs to be sent to a central cloud dramatically reduces central bandwidth requirements. Bottlenecks and congestion can be avoided. This is especially true for applications with high bandwidth requirements such as video streaming.
Compliance
Regulatory or compliance requirements are in favor of using a distributed cloud. Cloud services can be provided geographically distributed according to different country specific or regional legal requirements such as coming from the European Union. The availability of services increases because distributed cloud structures continue to function for a certain time regardless of the availability of the core cloud. Applications such as autonomous driving or automated industry 4.0 processes benefit from this, as the higher availability ensures greater security or avoids production downtimes. Further advantages include transparency to the user and working independently of the user’s location, mobile use and real-time applications due to its low latency.
Examples of possible uses
The distributed cloud is suitable for a wide range of applications. A typical application is content delivery networks. Decentralization ensures that content such as video is delivered in high quality regardless of the user’s location. Content delivery solutions work across different network technologies and use decentralized storage systems with intelligent caching technologies. They provide high bandwidth for users and reduce the centrally required network capacities. Instead of delivering and transmitting each video stream several times from the source to the recipient, the image material is stored decentral and only sent from there to the recipients.
Another example of application is the processing and storage of personal data. There are legal or regulatory requirements that prohibit the processing of personal or other sensitive data outside of a certain country or region or only allow it under strict conditions. A distributed cloud can be used to keep all affected data within the desired region.
Conclusion
The distributed cloud brings together Edge Computing, hybrid cloud and new business cases for cloud computing. It represents the future of the cloud and focuses on the topic of location.
Companies realized the benefits of the distributed cloud and move services to the locations where they are needed while operation, governance and evolution of the services remain in the responsibility of the public cloud service provider.
Most companies will use a distributed cloud option which is multi cloud and portability focused, such as portable applications and services. Another major part of companies will use a distributed cloud option and are not yet sure about their preferences.
Other plans are distributed clouds in an ecosystem approach which are led by a single vendor or leverage an edge computing approach not driven by a centralized vendor approach.
One out of ten companies are not interested in a distributed cloud option.
In future, companies can go to a cloud service provider and request resources to manage a workload that needs to meet certain compliance (i.e. GDPR) and business requirements (i.e. use of resources such as Internet of Things (IoT), assets, smart buildings using sensors to interconnect).