More than ever, the CIO has a two-speed information system. It must maintain and evolve its existing IT infrastructure while migrating at a certain pace in the public cloud. This observation has not escaped the giants of the cloud who now offer hybrid solutions, building bridges between the old and the new world. A way to bring new customers back to them, beyond the converts to the public cloud. To address this market, providers have adopted different approaches. "Microsoft Azure and AWS started with the IaaS services before progressively enriching their offer.Google makes the choice of any container.It is consistent with its strategy and its solutions that are intended for a population of developers", argue Damien Rollet, cloud architect and DevOps at Ippon Technologies.
For Damien Rollet, the maturity of the offer, the security, the level of commitment of services are among the criteria of choice. "The goal is to have the same customer experience between the public and on-premise environment, so the level of integration of the console and the APIs offered by the provider are to be closely watched," argues the cloud architect. .
Azure Stack, pioneer bonus
For once, Amazon Web Services (AWS) got the hang of it by Microsoft. After about a year and a half of pre-release, Azure Stack was released as a final release in July 2017. This is an Azure extension that allows a company to run cloud services in an on-premise environment.
Traditionally, Microsoft started by providing IaaS services to recreate a cloud-based infrastructure with virtual machines, storage resources and a virtual network. The Redmond company can rely on its strong presence in data centers through its Hyper-V and Windows Server virtualization solution.
For hardware, Microsoft has partnered with server builders: Dell, HPE, Cisco or Huawei. In late March, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Stack HCI, to surf the trend of converged infrastructures in vogue in data centers. On the PaaS part, Azure Stack offers support for MySQL databases, SQL Database and, soon, SQL Server 2019.
Higher level managed services are also coming gradually to the platform. Last September, Azure Stack's CEO announced in a blog post the availability of Service Fabric, Azure Site Recovery (ASR), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in public preview, and services IoT Hub and Event Hub in private preview.
AWS Outposts, the VMware Asset
New service announced in November 2018, Outposts is part of AWS 'strategy to conquer private clouds. In the wake of the partnership with VMware presented two and a half years ago, the Amazon subsidiary goes a step further in the hybrid world. Unlike Microsoft, which has partnered with manufacturers, AWS makes the choice to offer a hardware-based infrastructure that it has designed, promising the same level of service as its public cloud. A customer can perform on-site EC2 calculation and EBS storage services. In addition to this IaaS layer, AWS plans to add services such as RDS, ECS, EKS, SageMaker, and EMR over the months.
Its partneralui offers the ability to attack customers who have a strong history and an existing one, especially among large accounts
Outposts offers two options: a VMware version and an "AWS native" version. In the first case, "VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts" provides the data center with the computing, storage and network infrastructure for on-site execution. The solution is managed as a service from the same console as VMware Cloud on AWS. For Damien Rollet, this extension of the partnership with VMware allows Amazon to address, especially in France, a large installed base. "This gives it the ability to attack customers who have a strong history and a strong existing, especially among large accounts," insists the expert.
The second option is for organizations that prefer to use the APIs and consoles they are used to using in the AWS cloud. They will continue to do so but at home. The same VMware brings, here too, its stone to the building. The publisher offers VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2 to run its most common services in the environment, such as NSX, VMware AppDefense and VMware vRealize Automation. In either case, AWS delivers the racks to customers, installs them as needed, and maintains and replaces them. A scenario that seduced Volkswagen. In the contract with AWS unveiled at the end of March, the automaker says it wants to use Outposts for latency-sensitive applications. Currently in private preview, the commercial launch of Outposts is scheduled for the second half of 2019.
Google Cloud Anthos, the choice of any container
Anthos was without a doubt the most commented novelty of Next'19, the Google Cloud conference held this year in early April. In fact new, this is the new name of Google Cloud Services launched a year earlier. As for Azure and AWS, the web giant proposes to embed its technologies in the data centers of its customers. Originality, Anthos opens the way to multicloud by managing workloads executed on third-party clouds. And to accelerate the transition, Google Cloud also announced in beta Anthos Migrate, a service that automatically migrates virtual machines, from a local cloud to a public cloud.
we find the inevitable Kubernetes, the open source container orchestrator house available in two versions: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to run services in the public cloud Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and GKE On-Prem for deployment in third-party data centers. Anthos also relies on Kubernetes extensions including Knative, which can deploy functions, applications and containers in serverless mode, and Istio, a mesh service that manages and secures microservices. Stackdriver provides the monitoring component.
To ensure the compatibility of the underlying infrastructure, Google Cloud has moved closer to more than thirty hardware partners, software and integrators such as Cisco, Citrix, Dell-EMC, HPE, Intel, Lenovo and ... VMware, long-time partner of AWS.
