Getting to Know Your (New) Hybrid Multicloud

A few years ago, I wrote a series of blogs on modernizing infrastructure and becoming cloud smart. The industry at that time was on a tear to look at alternatives to the traditional models for running applications—on siloed and isolated infrastructure. It is safe to say that in the last 10 years the world of IT infrastructure has evolved.?

Cloud and infrastructure have become synonymous with each other. The cloud was being pitched as the panacea for IT’s infrastructure woes, gaining momentum in the last few years. Its growth is a testament to IT’s adoption of cloud as an alternative. Cloud and service providers have been able to convince developers, system integrators, and IT shops that public cloud is a viable alternative to the legacy silos. The hyperscalers delivering public cloud services have also successfully convinced the industry on changing buying habits through their marketplace and by commandeering end user IT budgets with unique models like MACC and EDP credits. Procuring third party software through their respective marketplaces to run on the hyperscalers clouds has simplified procurement and more.

Is public cloud the only future IT should consider? Based on responses from Nutanix’s most recent ECI study and other IT experts, the answer is no. The consensus on the future is that it is hybrid and it spans across multiple clouds. So, what is a hybrid multicloud? It is the model where IT can leverage multiple different clouds, ideally as a single extended cloud. Facilitated by connectivity and data/app mobility, IT application workload can span across them. For example: a hybrid multicloud can comprise of an IT organization’s self deployed infrastructure, a hosted service provider delivered compute and storage infrastructure, and a cloud service provider’s managed database (or DBaaS) and desktop services (or DaaS).?

A few trends exemplify the hybrid multicloud trend better than others. First is the universal evolution (neé simplification) of the networking space to make cloud boundaries invisible. For example organizations use VPCs and VPNs to hide the complexity of underlying intra and inter cloud networks from apps. Next is the widespread roll out of FinOps practices. Initially FinOps was all about tracking and later optimizing the usage of cloud as infrastructure. More recently, it has grown to also cover where to intelligently place what workload taking into account operations, migration, rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring costs i.e. how to become cloud smart and cloud balancing. Third is the adoption in the industry of hybrid multicloud tools, platforms and frameworks. The widespread adoption of Terraform for automating infrastructure workflows across multiple clouds using a software defined approach is one such example. The other is the consideration and pervasive use of multiple cloud platforms like Nutanix Cloud Platform. These platforms include tools and functionality that make it easy to migrate data by establishing a common execution framework for Virtual Machines. Kubernetes has done the same for containerized workloads; although a lot of IT shops often rely on a vendor’s storage functionality to facilitate data mobility. Nutanix Dataplane for Kubernetes for example facilitates this.?

IT shops shouldn’t be worried about taking on the risk of being the first to adopt Hybrid multicloud as it is now a mature concept. As an industry, we have spoken about it for over a decade and half and put it into practice for almost a decade. I still recall numerous conversations with IT professionals at a previous company on their journey to the cloud spanning across public and private cloud resources and services. Cloud and IT Infrastructure education and certifications like NPX have evolved to focus on designing and enabling multicloud networking, automation, and more.?

Hybrid multicloud implementations have also kept pace with the application landscape that IT has to support. We see a few different trends that are shaping cloud and infrastructure choices. But the main ones IT shops are tracking are the next gen apps leveraging microservices and distributed databases and the other are new AI and other HPC workloads leveraging accelerated computing like GPUs. Both workloads leverage software and services, built for and running in containers. This means IT and their hybrid multiclouds have to support IT’s needs for existing and new VMs and containers as well as supporting data including mix of large and numerous smaller databases as well as unstructured files and objects.?

Hybrid multicloud is one of the central themes at the .NEXT 2024 conference, Nutanix’s annual user conference being held from May 21 to 23, 2024. Attendees joining the conference will get the chance to hear from Nutanix’s technical experts on everything from creating a high performance platform for any workload to handling a mix of different databases as a service to best practices of running end-user applications and desktops across a hybrid multicloud setup.?

I am particularly excited about what this conference holds for partners including service providers and system integrators. Partners to get to know their new hybrid multicloud!?The conference has sessions on all aspects of hybrid multicloud including building a profitable and differentiated service provider practice, creating services around AI computing, deep dives on solutions areas such as database-as-a-service and EUC, discussions on FinOps, building a strong foundation of next generation apps using K8s, and understanding the hybrid multicloud related opportunities for partners using the Nutanix portfolio, one of my favorite topics. I’ve published some recommended sessions for these partners on our Nutanix NEXT community site.?

We’ll also have Nutanix Elevate Service Providers and Nutanix’s Global System Integrators showcasing their capabilities and offering to attendees like Adista, Atlas Cloud Services, HCL, OVHcloud, Systematika, and Wipro.?Reach out to the Nutanix team or any of our .NEXT sponsors and Elevate SP and System Integrator partners if you are interested in learning more about building your Hybrid Multicloud.