2014, the hybrid cloud is widely used in a year

The hybrid cloud may be a buzzword for cloud-computing vendors last year. VMware launches its vcloud Hybrid Service. Rackspace, Microsoft, HP, and joyent companies have been touting the ability to run software on public Cloud to manage their company data centers, creating a seamless management experience.

There are good reasons to talk about mixed clouds. Cloud computing is still in its infancy, meaning most companies are not ready to outsource their entire IT operations to the public cloud, experts say. However, many companies are attracted by the benefits of the cloud, such as automated custom configurations for virtual machines and storage. Therefore, if the public cloud is not suitable for all use cases, the enterprise still needs some kind of cloud, then typically will end up with a mixed deployment.

"If you don't have a mixed cloud now, there will certainly be a future," said research institute Gartner. The agency also said the hybrid cloud today is like the private cloud market three years ago. By 2017, Gartner predicts that mainstream companies will have a hybrid cloud defined as a policy-based service delivery platform spanning both internal and external cloud resources. So what is hindering the development of the industry?

People and processes are an obstacle to the development of the cloud. "The most common problem is that employees bypass it to get the public cloud," said John Humphreys, vice president of Sales at Egenera Inc., a consultancy and IT management firm in Boston. This "shadow IT" problem is because employees want to get the benefits of cloud computing: easy access to virtual machines or storage resources without the need to wait in situ.

It may be frustrating for employees to circumvent it, but Humphreys says this is just proof that employees are looking for this type of service. It stores, he says, have the opportunity to become an internal service provider for these employees, rather than letting employees bypass it, and they can access cloud-based functionality using approved IT resources. "The big question is, how can we make it easier for our employees to pass us instead of bypassing us?" ”

So why is it not accepted if the market is in demand? This may be because the vendor-supplied platform is still immature, says Bryan Cantrill, senior vice president of engineering at Joyent, who is a small, technically-savvy IAAS provider on the market (as opposed to AWS, Microsoft and Google).

Platforms from different vendors are still in the early stages. VMware just released its public/mixed cloud platform last fall. Microsoft has been launching its platform for a longer time, but Rackspace is also developing a private cloud platform based on OpenStack code that is maturing and evolving. Joyent's hybrid cloud service is based on its smartos, an operating system developed in-house that runs its public cloud. Smartdatacenter is the joyent use of Smartos's private cloud platform name, and customers can run it in their own environment.

"We see a staggering amount of mixed clouds," Cantrill said. "When we sell private clouds, there is almost always a public cloud component." "The advantage of letting your private cloud and public cloud on the same platform is that the business between the two can change over time," he said. Which platform the application should run on is best suited, not just to see if it stores support it. If this is a highly dynamic application and an unknown peak, the public cloud is the best. Highly secure and performance-intensive applications are better in a private cloud. Instead, create a platform with a hybrid cloud that can run any of their applications.

The hybrid cloud will be a platform for leading industries to move forward, said Vikrant Karnik, senior vice president of Gemini, a system-integrated cloud computing consulting business. He helped large business customers plan and implement their cloud strategy, and he said that many big financial and pharmaceutical companies might not be too willing to migrate their entire IT operations to the public cloud.

The largest companies in the country, as well as those with the largest IT budgets, are quite restrained in using public cloud development and testing or backup and recovery. They already have a lot of infrastructure to support their business-they don't throw them away. Because of this, the cloud market will be a hybrid, Karnik said. If this type of company wants to use any public cloud, it will be part of a mixed cloud.

It is therefore important to establish a unified platform between public and private clouds and to have a vendor cloud management platform that contains everything. Mixed clouds are coming towards us, and in many cases it is already here. 2013 is a year for vendors to expose their hybrid cloud strategy, and customers will start using them in 2014.