New dbInsight research: Exploring the Hybrid Cloud market landscape
A sleeper trend that we identified in our annual look ahead was, not simply the growing embrace of cloud computing, but the drivers behind it. In our conversations with enterprise IT executives and practitioners, we are increasingly finding that the default option for deploying or re-deploying IT systems was changing, with the cloud starting to replace on-premise as the base case. But, of course, this is not a blind march to the public cloud – instead, the trigger is gaining the operational simplicity and flexibility of the cloud control plane, regardless of where the systems were going to get deployed. Enter the era of the Hybrid Default.
And so we got curious about how this was impacting the market landscape. Over the last 12 – 18 months, we’ve seen all of the major household names introducing to market new hybrid platforms. The watershed was AWS’s surprise announcement of Outposts nearly a year and a half ago at re:Invent 2018. Was this a case of the tail wagging the dog, or a real response to a latent market need?
Admittedly, our definition of hybrid cloud is more expansive than most: we consider it the superset of public, private, and more narrowly defined hybrid cloud. It is a cloud strategy that spans on-premise and public cloud, because we believe that in practice, many enterprise applications will either span both environments or integrate with other applications across them. So why draw arbitrary boundaries? Enterprises want their data and processes to be seamless.
Regardless of the velocity of the move to public cloud, hybrid will play a central role for many if not most enterprises. Internal policies or external mandates will play a role in keeping some data or processes on-premise, while in other cases, legacy systems that simply keep the lights on may be the last to move, if ever.
What further stirred our curiosity is that this new landscape of hybrid cloud platforms was comprised of apples and oranges. We’re seeing everything from software-defined virtualized environments to full-throated appliances that fit the definition of classic turnkey systems in everything but name. In other words, the market is still defining what is a hybrid cloud – this is the classic sign of a market that is still forming before our eyes.
So we chose to survey a sampling of the leading players in cloud and enterprise computing to see what are the choices that enterprises have today. We reached out to the leading cloud players: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google. And then we looked at the strategies of enterprise incumbents IBM and Oracle to see how they are adapting to this new reality. Rounding it out is a name that may not be quite as familiar: Nutanix. We included them because, with several rivals embracing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), we wanted to see how the dominant player in HCI was pivoting to hybrid cloud. And we asked the following questions:
Vendor focus – Is the hybrid platform cloud-vendor specific or agnostic?
DBaaS support – What database platform(s) are supported? Are they limited to a specific cloud platform provider?
Kubernetes – Does the hybrid platform support K8s, and if so, was support built into the platform or retrofitted to it? How complete is K8s support?
Form Factor – Is the hybrid platform software-only, or a combined software + hardware offering? Is specially-certified hardware required, or does the offering run on commodity hardware? Who supplies the hardware?
Implementation/Operation – Who designs, installs, provisions, operates, and/or maintains the platform: the vendor or the customer/third party?
Architecture – Does the hybrid platform converge compute and storage, or separate them? What components are required to deploy the platform? Is control connected or disconnected from the public cloud?
Autoscaling – Does the platform automatically scale to support the workload, or require manual intervention?
Upgrade and patching – How are software upgrades and patches managed, and is it automated?
Security – Which party(s) are responsible for maintaining a secure environment, for protecting data, and for managing access?
Skills – What skills and competencies does the customer/IT organization require to operate the hybrid cloud? Will it require that the customer have proficiency with cluster management, Kubernetes, or any other specific skills, or is this handled by the vendor?
Here’s a hint of what we found. As stated above, hybrid cloud is in the eyes of the beholder, as the solutions run the gamut from software-defined environments to appliances that either the vendor manages, or they don’t. We found that the skills that enterprises will need to adopt these platforms will vary; for instance, some require IT staffs to be fully skilled on Kubernetes, while others don’t. We believe that the biggest bang for the buck, when it comes to operational simplification, is delivery of vendor-managed services where the provider configures and handles all the housekeeping, allowing the customer to focus on their data and applications. With a few exceptions, fully vendor-managed cloud services are still the missing link, and with few exceptions, hybrid cloud platform providers have yet to build third-party ecosystems that enterprises expect of core infrastructure, data, and application platforms.
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