The public cloud can come to your private data center, here’s how

Azure Stack Hub, AWS Outpost, Google Anthos and IBM Cloud Satellite, to name four, can all bring their public cloud power to your private office.

We talk a lot about hybrid clouds these days. It all boils down to combining the compute and storage goodness of public cloud services, such asAmazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure with the blessing of having a private cloud, your own hardware in your own server rooms or data center running a cloud software stack. In practice, that’s hard to do. There is one simple way. That’s to use the same cloud stack both on your public cloud and in the happy confines of your own offices.

And how do you do that exactly? By using public cloud software and hardware in your space. Specifically, these are offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outpost, Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Google Anthos or IBM Cloud Satellite.

Now, there are other ways of building hybrid clouds. For example, you can use a public cloud based on OpenStack with your own OpenStack servers. Examples of these include Rackspace OpenStack Public Cloud, Open Telekom Cloud and CT Cloud Platform. Or, there’s my particular favorite: A hybrid-cloud based on Kubernetes. There are many examples of these including Red Hat OpenShift,Cloud Foundry and VMware Tanzu. But, all these have one big problem in common. It’s hard to set them up and to manage them.

Don’t get me wrong. It can be done, and the rewards can be worthwhile. But, and it’s a big but, you really need to have people on your staff who know OpenStack or Kubernetes inside and out. And, in case you haven’t ever tried to hire someone like that, they are few and far between and, oh yes, very expensive.

That’s where Outpost, Azure Stack, Google Anthos and, most recently, IBM Cloud Satellite come in. Each of them is essentially an extension of their public cloud offering into your own office. They all, of course, have their own take. Here’s a quick summary of what you can expect from each one.

With AWS Outpost, AWS provides a fully managed service. AWS drops off pre-configured hardware and software to your on-premise data center or co-location space. As AWS CEO Andy Jassy said when it was introduced: “Customers will order racks with the same hardware AWS uses in all of our regions, with software with AWS services on it.