Unless you have been hiding under a rock, or maybe spending too much time looking at the clouds passing by, the last couple of years have seen the advent of the adoption of the cloud as a major part of enterprise IT infrastructure.  As with everything in IT infrastructure, trends are followed for and without good reasons. Like I’ve argued before, outsourcing your non business critical software to SaaS may make sense, while maintaining your core business on site seem to be a good approach. In this piece however, I’d like to address the adoption of the cloud as PaaS, what are the pitfalls of that type of approach, and how adopting cloud as IaaS could alleviate some of these pitfalls. Perhaps more importantly, I’d like to offer a nuanced approach that will hopefully avoid an all-or-nothing approach. In short, here is how I view it:

Note: As always, I am touching here on enterprise data strategies as the backbone of a business, and therefore talking about data platforms as a whole. I’m not talking about expert systems/system of records and where/how they should be implemented.

Going all in

Exposing the flaws of going all into one cloud is fairly straight forward. Cloud infrastructure is super attractive. Being able to spin up at will nodes and services is super attractive. It’s like a kid at an arcade choosing what to play next. Until you run out of quarters and want to take a worthy price home. Here are some clear limitations of going all in into one cloud, and using all its services:

  • The services you use lock you in. If you develop something on AWS for instance, using lambda or any other tool, you will have a hard time the day you want to move these applications. To some extent, all the work you have done to liberate your data from your system of records and drive a true data driven business could be rendered void by going all in with one cloud.
  • Cloud vendors are very good a getting your data in and storing it for cheap, as well as running ephemeral elastic workloads. However, running long lasting compute or getting data out can be extremely costly.
  • Maintaining internal process of governance & security are very limited in the cloud.
  • Not all clouds are equal across the globe. If you truly are a global business you must have the ability to chose the cloud vendor that is available in your region.

The hybrid approach: a great option for today

The response to these limitations comes in form of a hybrid cloud. It is the idea of having workloads running on components that can be deployed on demand on premises or in the cloud in the same manner. Frankly, this solves 99% of the problems IT is trying to solve:

  • The services you use are infrastructure agnostic, and therefore allow you to maintain control of your data.
  • You can leverage cloud vendors for ephemeral workloads and on site for long lasting ones.
  • Governance and security are shared across cloud/on-prem.
  • You get to leverage any cloud.

As always, the devil is in the details. The only true way to implement a hybrid cloud is to have the same architecture on prem and in the cloud. This means separating storage and compute, as opposed to having storage and compute coupled like it is traditionally setup on premises. Theoretically, considering the advances of networking, and the advances of container management, morphing traditional architectures to have compute and storage separated should be fine.

The hybrid-er approach: a path towards true agnosticity

Like I mentioned before, I am a firm proponent of the hybrid approach. Nevertheless, I can’t help but imagining a world in 5 to 10 years, where everyone has implemented their hybrid data platform backend and the hot new tech is a new platform that provides a very specific and essential set of capabilities (think complex AI workloads) only possible by coupling compute and storage. Traditional RDBMS weren’t fit for many types of work (e.g. large scale, etc.), that does not mean they completely disappeared. I think we are going to see the same thing with containerization. It will be essential for many cases, but for others, different resources managers may be more appropriate. Regardless, these are truly exciting times, and I am very excited to be in the midst of this transformation.