Enabling Breakthrough Open Hybrid Cloud Innovation

Public cloud has been around for about a decade; during that time we’ve gone through a very rapid evolution from skepticism, to experimentation, to a great debate about private versus public cloud and which is best. Through this debate, it’s become evident that the vast majority of enterprises will use private and public clouds together to enable their business. As simplistic as that sounds, managing a hybrid cloud environment can be costly and complex. Today, hybrid cloud is here to stay and almost every organization and cloud player realizes it’s all about the right workload in the right environment whether that is a private or public cloud.

While hybrid is here to stay, that’s not to say that it’s easy. There are significant differences between public and private clouds, and it’s hard to write applications that can move easily between these environments, let alone provide a consistent experience for developers. Developers want to be able to develop in the public cloud and deploy in the private cloud, for instance. While just about everyone knows that they need hybrid cloud capabilities, it’s not been easy, especially for organizations who want an open approach that can extend to work with multiple public clouds.

We have seen a natural distribution of existing applications, some that belong on-premises, and some that belong in public cloud. The challenge — and the magic — is in getting those applications to all work together. In essence, allowing applications to extend across environments where they can take advantage of applications and services residing in other data centers and clouds.

One of the things that makes hybrid hard is that while cloud generally abstracts underlying hardware and resources, these abstractions are different in various clouds. It’s actually a good thing – enabling the rapid innovation and expansion of cloud platform capabilities that we’ve seen over the last several years – but those differences can become a real hindrance for enterprises implementing hybrid cloud.

It’s with these challenges in mind that engineering teams from Cisco and Google Cloud started working together on a new solution.