Where Are We Going After Multicloud? What's The Future Of All This?
Continued Rise of Complex Cloud Deployments
Okay, I hear you barking, “Dave really went out on a limb for this obvious prediction that cloud computing will become more complex.” Stay with me. We’ve already covered multicloud in its current and evolving state in this book. The likelihood that its evolution will continue is close to 100 percent. However, I’m going to take things a bit further and talk about what will most likely come next after complexity settles into our everyday reality. After that, I’ll take us forward from now until about 20 years from now.
There are three main things that make hybrid and multicloud deployments harder to secure:
The first is visibility. Specifically, when you mix public and private cloud with on-premises infrastructure, you need not only visibility but also deep visibility to manage the complexity and make sure that gaps don’t develop. If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it.
The second thing to think about in these types of environments is insecure data transmission. Data that flows between public and private clouds or from on-premises or in a co-location, or co-lo, can be vulnerable to attack. We’re seeing organizations turn to tools that encrypt data both in flight and at rest.
The third thing that keeps some customers up at night, particularly if their data is globally dispersed, is the idea of falling out of compliance. The stakes for that are high from both a reputation and financial perspective. We’re seeing teams look at compliance at the start of their hybrid deployment and plan through a lens of compliance.
Figure 10-1 depicts our move from “Single-Cloud Deployments” into “Cross-Cloud Services” (also known as Supercloud/Metacloud Services). We covered this move earlier in the book. The only thing I would add here is that we’re just beginning our journey to cross-cloud services. Most of you will be operating single-cloud and multicloud deployments until well after this book hits the streets. Cross- cloud services will continue to evolve in the meantime, and I’m sure they will be the focus of my day- to-day activities for at least the next five years. The future “Cross-Cloud Services” journey is depicted in Figure 10-1. “Cross-Cloud Platform” and “Ubiquitous Deployment” are what I believe will be the next evolutions of cloud technology. Let me tell you why.
FIGURE 10-1 The progression of cloud computing clearly moves from single-cloud deployments to multicloud, where we are now, and then to more common cross-cloud services (supercloud/metacloud,), and then to ubiquitous cloud deployments and services. This is when cloud services and application services may exist anywhere, and auto migrate to the platform that provides the best cost efficiency.
Keep in mind that a cross-cloud architecture is a combination of software and services that will be delivered to give organizations freedom and control of private and public clouds. We do this by designing above the physical public cloud providers, thus removing the limitations of those physical cloud deployments from the cross-cloud architecture.
Let’s define what a cross-cloud platform is and how it will likely evolve from cross-cloud services. First, no two enterprises are the same. Each will have different requirements for security, governance, FinOps, compliance, and application and data, and different technology to fulfill those requirements. Most cross-cloud services that reside in a supercloud/metacloud are not predefined platforms, but layers of technology that need to be custom fit for each enterprise. There are no turnkey solutions, and each cross-cloud layer will be a bespoke layer of technologies that will vary from enterprise to enterprise.
Any custom fit technology gets us back to the two words enterprises hate to hear, “It depends.” In the case of every supercloud/metacloud, it does depend, and that’s why you’ll need very skilled architects to define the technology stacks that make up cross-cloud services.
As cross-cloud platforms begin to emerge, the technology industry will adapt to new market demands. Ubiquitous sets of cross-cloud services can be configured in many ways to deal with many different types of requirements. Rather than look at each set of clouds as a new problem that needs a customized solution, we’ll leverage a single platform (supercloud/metacloud) that can provide everything the enterprise needs for security, operations, AI, data, data integration, and so forth. It will be one-stop shopping for all the services you need to exist above and between cloud providers.
If cross-cloud platforms work as planned, which they should, most enterprises will move in this direction even if they already have some custom cross-cloud solutions in place. They’ll make this move for the same reasons we began the move to the cloud: We want to make the technology stack somebody else’s problem. By moving to a cross-cloud platform, we do just that.
Of course, the development of supercloud/metacloud architectures and the services that work on them will take a staggering amount of provider-supplied capital, much like cloud computing providers had to invest and spend millions of dollars at the onset of cloud computing. The larger cloud computing providers will likely offer the first commercial-grade cross-cloud platforms and end up owning that market as well. Only major players will have the resources required to build a new technology and develop its market from the ground up, and then be capable of funding the years of investments that need to be made. Here we go again.
The next phase following cross-cloud supercloud/metacloud platforms comes along further into the future. Ubiquitous deployments will install autonomous services onto a distributed array of technol- ogies that we’re authorized to use. We won’t deploy them to a specific platform, but to a technology pool in general. This pool will include public clouds, edge computing, and on-site systems. Anything you own that is connected to a network, can store data, and has a processor can be a candidate to run these ubiquitous and fully autonomous services.
The kicker here is that these services, once developed and/or deployed, can exist by finding the best platform to run on, or even divide themselves so they can run on many platforms at the same time. The objective will be for these services to operate with the most efficiency, and thus use the least number of resources and money. They will be intelligent and have awareness of every other service around them, including hosting platforms, and will bring along security, governance, operations, and other services needed to provide the best operational efficiency.
The reason a ubiquitous service deployment is so attractive is around its underlying simplicity. We’ll no longer build centralized systems for security, operations, FinOps, and so on, as we did with the previous two evolutions. Instead, all those services will be contained within the ubiquitous deployment and thus exist wherever the service exists, all aware of each other, all working together in a distributed configuration. Everything will be self-contained and thus require very little human intervention (if any) and be intelligent, self-aware, and completely automated.
We’re working toward this end during today’s growth of multicloud technology and in what we’ll see developed for the next 10 years. During this time, we’ll also master the successful use of containers. In many respects, today’s containers are the prototypes for ubiquitous deployments. We’ll see containers evolve in this direction and eventually subsume traditional infrastructure tooling to provide something more flexible and scalable. Ubiquitous deployments will combine containerized applications and data, which will add much improved functionality to those containers to build a full operational stack. Ubiq- uitous deployments are on the horizon, but commonplace use is still many years into the future. I can’t wait to see if I live that long!