The Rise of the Super Cloud and What it Means for Specialized Workloads

This article was authored by me and posted on my company’s website. Please read the full article there.

First came “the cloud,” and IT embraced and consumed it. For many companies, this evolved into hybrid-cloud due to business requirements such as meeting regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, leveraging paid-for on-premises technology investments, and addressing requirements for low latency, especially when communicating to legacy architectures.

Then came “multi-cloud,” as described by Vmware and others. Where “the cloud” usually means using the services of a single cloud provider, which most of us have done, “multi-cloud” describes using multiple cloud providers’ services in a heterogeneous way. More complex than the single cloud, multi-cloud is helpful for organizations needing to pick and choose services from various cloud vendors or requiring high-end redundancy. Today, 61% of businesses use one or two clouds and are considered to be “multi-cloud.” The drawback of multi-cloud is that each cloud operates in a more isolated operational model, and the customer has to integrate them. Concerns about specialized skill sets, greater complexity, and increased security concerns are often cited as the challenges of multi-cloud.

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Don’t have a Cloud Strategy? You should still migrate one app to the Cloud.

“Cloud computing is in its beginning stages and will only continue to grow, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday.” (June 28th, 2022)

Even if you currently don’t have a comprehensive cloud strategy, regardless of the reason, there is a justification for doing a “proof-of-concept” in the cloud for at least one application of significance in your app portfolio.

Here are a few top reasons companies cite why they don’t move to the cloud. Of course, there could be many others, but these are popular.

  1. Costs (cost of the cloud service, plus implied costs like network connectivity)
  2. Your applications are antiquated and based on mainframe or mid-range servers.
  3. Security
  4. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
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Leverage the Cloud to help consolidate on-prem systems

Use the Cloud as your “sandbox” to experiment and do R&D for on-prem systems.

This document discusses using a cloud model to architecturally validate the possibility of consolidating multiple application servers or instances into a smaller number of physical resources that will ultimately remain on-prem. For this document, the cloud offering from Skytap is used as the example cloud for the possible approach, although the same techniques can be leveraged in other cloud offerings.

It is important to note that this document is not advocating for reengineering applications from on-prem to the cloud, though that is a possibility. Instead, the focus of this document is to describe how to leverage the cloud to help validate the design of re-organizing a large number of physical on-prem servers down to a smaller number of resources also hosted on-prem. In this case, the cloud is used as the R&D “sandbox” for key design assumptions.

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