Will the Real Hybrid Cloud Please Stand Up?

A long, long time ago, so long ago that the distance back can be measured in years, not weeks or months, Hybrid Cloud meant a deployment model that was a combination of private and public cloud that were bound together.  Private would often mean on premises.  This was part of the definition, as written by NIST:  http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf

However, the term hybrid has been acquired for use to also mean deployment across heterogeneous environments, such as different public cloud providers.  An episode of Enterprise DevOps Initiatives podcast this past summer titled "Hybrid Cloud is Not a Choice, It’s a Realization" (https://www.cloudtp.com/doppler/hybrid-cloud-not-choice-realization/) has a title that seems somewhat provocative when taken in context of the earlier definition.  Private clouds tend to be mandated by a rather specific requirement, such as data location regulations, and are not necessarily a common necessity.  So to state that it is a realization to eventually come to seems somewhat hyperbolic.  However, in the context of the newer definition, the title is much more mainstream. 

Services offered by major public cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft have become complex and varied beyond the basic storage, compute and network they started with.   A quick look here: https://cloud.google.com/products/ or here: https://aws.amazon.com/products/ shows this.  So the argument they are making is that in order to make good use of cloud services, you end up using many of the products.  And inevitably, the differences in available products will cause you to customize for one public cloud provider or another.  This will be true even for service products that are equivalent across cloud providers, as there will be some variation in implementation.  According the discussion between the host, Mike Kavis, and the guest, Rob Hirschfeld, this definition of hybrid would extend to differences in software versions of the same product if the version differences required migration problems for the application using it.

One attempt at mitigation of this is to only use the basic cloud services - such as compute, storage and networking mentioned above.  However, doing so loses many of the advantages of a cloud based implementation.

The guest suggests that hybridization cannot be eliminated, but simply must be managed.  The approach advocated, as can be seen at his company RackN https://rackn.com/ and the associated project Digital Rebar http://rebar.digital/ , is to compartmentalize the variations between platforms so that changes required for portability are isolated.

In another episode from a different podcast, Cloud Weekly Podcast, titled "Vendor Lock-In is Unavoidable" (https://www.cloudtp.com/doppler/vendor-lock-unavoidable/) the discussion echoes some of the same ideas.  Namely, that using the comprehensive set of services available from a cloud provider gives great benefits, but also leads to being tied to that provider.  The solution is, again, plan for it and manage it.

Now, before we shed a tear for the passing of the previous definition of hybrid cloud computing, observe that it is still in use.  Last week there was announcement of a partnership between VMware and AWS: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/vmware-aws-announce-strategic-partnership.html . Note this sentence from the announcement: "Currently in Technology Preview, VMware Cloud on AWS, will bring VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center software to the AWS cloud, and will enable customers to run any application across vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation based private, public and hybrid cloud environments."

Additionally, the original definition of hybrid cloud becomes more nuanced as we move forward.  Microsoft spent a significant amount of time discussing hybrid cloud at its recent Ignite Conference.  The graphic at the beginning of this article reporting on Microsoft's attention to the subject - http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-microsoft-is-circling-its-hybrid-cloud-wagons/ - shows that the concept of hybrid cloud is being stretched to include public cloud services combined with on premises servers (ex. Hybrid Database = Azure SQL Database + SQL Server; Hybrid Identity = Azure Active Directory + Active Directory).  This interpretation makes sense, of course, for Microsoft as it plays to their established strengths of existing enterprise software.

So, will the real Hybrid Cloud please stand up?