Cloud Without Compromise

Introduction

There are three things that dominate 90% of technology conversations today: AI, cybersecurity, and cloud—we’re guessing you figured out what this book is about by the cover. (And we know you’re wondering: the animal is a black swan—quite fitting when you think about the state of the world when we started writing the book.)

Collectively our authoring team has well over a century of IT expertise and that means we’ve seen a lot of stuff (we had a different word in here, but it looks like the editor changed that). If you’ve ever stumbled across the Gartner Hype Cycle, you’ll know that just because a technology is the “talk of the town,” it doesn’t guarantee success in the grand scheme of things. We’ve found that even for those technologies that find their way out of Gartner’s “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and into the “Plateau of Productivity” part of their Hype Cycle curve, the calculus can still become a damp squib (a wet firework that fails to go off). Time and time again, we see an upstart technology that becomes all the rage, but just doesn’t quite manage to stick the landing the first time: Knowledge Graphs (we still think something will happen here), Learning Gamification (at least the way most people implement it), governance (most organizations have a least effort to comply approach), and Hadoop…just to name a few.

Let’s be clear on something: Cloud is not in a hype cycle! In fact, it’s one of the most significant platform inflection points of our time (especially when you start thinking about cloud in the way we describe it in this book). It’s true, sometimes we look at each other and say, “I can’t even keep a cell phone connection, how is the world going to totally run on cloud?” Make no mistake about it, cloud is here and it’s here to stay—you need to pivot the way you think about cloud if you want to get all you can out of it.

However, we’ve found that most businesses aren’t getting the value out of the cloud that they were expecting (the mental model around cloud was too narrowed by the hype). Some might feel that there’s more value yet to be uncovered, other organizations are guilty of not even knowing what to expect (just like AI, many jumped on the notion that the gains will be instant—like magic), and some are even repatriating public cloud workloads back to their traditional runtimes. Why? Too many compromises.

How do you get to cloud without compromise? It’s not a vendor thing. We’re not here to tell you the only way to get cloud without compromise is to migrate everything to a particular vendor’s public cloud. For example, while we think there are nuances for specific types of applications that make the IBM Public Cloud a standout (highly regulated industries like finance), other public cloud providers have their own characteristics that are differentiated too (take a look at the catalog and configuration options on AWS).

There are two things to really grasp before you can get to a cloud without compromise. First, internalize what will become a mantra of this book: cloud is a capability, not a destination. Cloud without compromise means you’re shifting your mindset from a place to an operational model. Second, cloud without compromise means you’re embracing a unified distributed hybrid cloud strategy. A hybrid cloud unifies public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure with consistent management and orchestration to create a single, flexible, cost-optimal IT infrastructure (the distributed part means it doesn’t matter what vendor you select for your public cloud resources. Let the gravitational pull to a cloud vendor be the strengths—its cloud capabilities—that uniquely serve your business. This is why we’ll advocate again and again for looking at cloud as a capability (instead of a destination), so that your business and the things it needs to be successful can run (and interoperate) anywhere to everywhere. The outcome? Companies with a no compromise cloud strategy are empowered businesses that can:

• Combine best-of-breed cloud services and functionality from multiple cloud computing vendors

• Choose the optimal cloud computing environment for each workload

• Move workloads freely between public and private cloud as circumstances change

When no compromises are made, companies are free to pursue their technical and business objectives more effectively and cost-efficiently than they would otherwise be able to through any single public or private cloud vendor alone. In fact, according to one recent study, companies derive up to 2.5x more value from a hybrid cloud strategy than from following a single-cloud, single-vendor approach.

Initially, hybrid cloud architectures focused on the mechanics of transforming portions of a company’s on-premises datacenter into private cloud infrastructure, and then connecting that infrastructure to public cloud environments hosted off-premises by a public cloud provider. Today’s hybrid cloud architecture needs to be focused less on physical connectivity, and more toward supporting workload portability across all cloud environments (the location or vendor doesn’t matter) and on automating the deployment of those workloads to cloud environments (again, agnostic to vendor or location) with the most gravitational pull for your application’s needs.

Several trends are driving this shift. As part of the next critical step in their digital transformations, organizations are building new applications (and modernizing legacy applications) to leverage cloud native technologies—technologies that enable consistent and reliable development, deployment, management, and performance across cloud environments and across cloud vendors, including on-premises infrastructure. Specifically, they’re building and transforming applications to use microservices architectures, which deconstruct unwieldy monolithic applications into smaller, loosely coupled, reusable components focused on specific business functions. And they’re deploying these applications in containers—lightweight executable units that contain only the application code and just enough of the virtualized operating system dependencies required to run it. These technologies serve as a foundation for enabling businesses to drive a new-age culture of productivity, such as development cycles that last days or weeks (instead of quarters or years) and the inclusion of highly effective methodologies like test-driven development, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), A/B testing, and more.

At a higher level, public and private clouds are no longer physical “locations” to connect together. For example, many cloud vendors now offer public cloud services that run in their customers’ on-premises datacenters. Private clouds, once run exclusively on-premises, are now often hosted in off-premises datacenters, on virtual private networks (VPNs) or virtual private clouds (VPCs), or on dedicated infrastructure rented from third-party providers (who may happen to be public cloud providers).

What’s more, infrastructure virtualization with the aid of automation (infrastructure as code) allows these environments to be created, on demand, using any resources located behind (or beyond) a firewall. This takes on added importance with the advent of edge computing, which offers opportunities to improve global application performance by moving workloads closer to where data is created and consumed.

Cloud native development makes it possible for developers to transform monolithic applications into units of business-focused functionality that can be run anywhere and reused within a variety of applications. A standard operating system (like Linux) lets developers build any hardware dependency into a container. And Kubernetes orchestration and automation delivers granular, set-it-and-forget-it control over container configuration and deployment—including security, load balancing, scalability, and more—across multiple cloud environments. (Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about what we just wrote; this book is going to teach you about all of this.)

We talk a lot in this book about the untapped cloud value that remains for those downtrodden on their cloud journeys. To the uninitiated, they might think, “Yes, that means if I move everything to a public cloud vendor, I will get all this value.” That’s not what it means—remember, cloud is a capability, not a destination. But the right cloud strategy (which you’ll learn how to craft in this book) will certainly deliver:

Improved developer productivity

This helps expand the adoption of Agile and DevOps methodologies, and enables dev(elopment) teams to build once and deploy anywhere.

Greater infrastructure efficiency

With on-demand granular control over rapidly provisioned compute and storage resources, development, and IT operations, teams can optimize their spend across public cloud services, private clouds, and cloud vendors. Hybrid cloud also helps companies modernize applications faster and connect cloud services to data on cloud or on-premises infrastructure in ways that deliver new value.

Larger breadth and depth

Access to a larger number of services spanning AI (which includes machine learning and deep learning) capabilities, storage, data processing, analytics, automation, and more. These are services that cloud vendors have tailored for your business’s needs with the expertise and depth to run them at enterprise scale.

Improved regulatory compliance and security

A unified platform lets organizations draw on best-of-breed cloud security and regulatory compliance technologies, implementing Zero Trust security and compliance across all environments in a consistent way.

Overall business acceleration

This includes shorter product development cycles; accelerated innovation and time-to-market; faster response to customer feedback; faster delivery of applications closer to the client (like edge ecommerce); and faster integration with partners or third parties to deliver new products and services.

If you want cloud without compromise, without a doubt in our minds, almost every medium to large organization requires a hybrid cloud strategy that starts with capabilities and not destinations (let that fall into place afterward) and folks…that’s what this book is all about.