Hybrid cloud is one of the most common architectural patterns out there,
but it's generally actually the result of companies that are unable to abandon
an existing technology stack in favor of the public cloud. But what if
I told you you could get the best of both worlds? The innovation
and cutting edge technologies made possible through public cloud providers,
and at the same time having the flexibility and freedom of running your
assets where you choose to, whether it's on-prem or edge. Today let's
talk about distributed cloud and the key benefits that it offers.
Now I want to start with what a general hybrid cloud architecture
looks like. So, you're going to have customers that are running things on
on-prem environments, maybe they're running things on public
cloud environments or even private clouds, or even in addition
we might have edge environments. Now
managing all of these environments comes with their own set of Ops teams,
challenges, data locality, latency concerns,
basically all of them will require some overhead to maintain.
Distributed cloud comes in right at the center.
Essentially what you'll have is a public cloud
sitting right at the center that's able to manage
all of those other environments. Essentially it extends the capabilities
of a public cloud to other capabilities. Now i think
Gartner put it best when they said, that in a report that they recently
published, they said that distributed cloud fixes what hybrid
cloud breaks. Now today I want to cover four
major themes that generally correspond with what distributed cloud aims to
solve, and these actually happen to line up
with where hybrid cloud tends to fall short.
Now the first one that I want to start with is consistency.
Now as I go through the example today I'm going to put on a number of
different hats, whether I'm Dev, Ops, or Security, and I
want to start with an Ops Engineer because an Ops Engineer
will generally have to be kind of interfacing with a distributed cloud
environment, and that's where they will generally
start. So, as an Ops Engineer, let's say that one of the first things
that I want to do is work with a cloud environment. So
what Ii want to do is go to a public cloud
and in that environment let's say that I want to create
a Kubernetes, or even an OpenShift cluster.
So, basically a way to manage and orchestrate cloud-based applications.
Now in this process of creating an OpenShift cluster
I'm probably given an option at one point to choose where do I want this
cluster to live. So here's where I'm given a few choices.
So, maybe i want to do it in a public cloud location.
So, let's say for example somewhere like Dallas
or London, but through a distributed cloud I can
register with the public cloud other locations. So maybe somewhere like
an on-prem or edge location. So, let's say I've got an on-prem
location in Bangalore,
or an edge location in Morocco. So basically what we've got
here, is whether it's public, on-prem, or edge
locations, we can choose one of those capabilities
in, directly in my public cloud UI and
dashboard. That's what a distributed cloud will
generally offer. So, through this process I'm now able to
deploy OpenShift container platform clusters
in three different regions. Let's say, so we've got three different OCD
clusters. We'll say one of them is in public.
We'll say one of them is in edge.
And we'll say the last one is on-prem. Okay. So, we've got that kind of situated
from an Ops Engineering perspective I'm able to create and manage clusters
across the board whether they're in any of these general
hybrid cloud style environments. Now as an Ops Engineer that
might be good for day one, but for day two
I need additional capabilities. Let's say that I want to do something like
scaling up and down. Well that's one of the key advantages of a cloud,
is the elasticity. So, let's say I can scale up and down.
In addition, let's say I want my clusters to be able to network and interface with
one another, basically communicate my applications communicating across the
board. So, maybe i want to take advantage of a service mesh capability,
that's something a distributed cloud can offer. So,
taking a look at that we can start doing some service meshing capabilities.
Okay. So, now that we've got that groundwork laid out, we've covered how
basically for an Ops Engineer I have a consistent
experience for deploying clusters in any of these locations,
you have consistency. Next up, let's talk about DevOps.
So, we've covered a bit of DevOps already, so with the Ops perspective of deploying
and managing clusters, but for developers who want to utilize
capabilities generally available in public clouds,
well I have a different angle of approach here.
So, putting on my hat as a Dev. Now let's say one of the first things
that I want to do here is create a service, right. So
generally with OCP most DevOps capabilities are handled it's a really
good platform for being able to work with containers
and kind of deploying apps, but let's say I want to take advantage of a service
that cloud providers generally provide. So, this would be something like a
database. So I want to create a DB. So, I'm in my
cloud provider, I'm in the dashboard, and I want to
create a database and I'm given a similar option. I'm asked
where do you want to create it? And some given options like before,
data centers or locations, not just public cloud but also on-prem or edge,
and I can choose to deploy those high-value capabilities,
you know so I can decide to deploy a database in my public cloud.
Well this is nothing special I've been able to do that. Or I should be able to
deploy a database, in addition into edge environments.
So that's taken care of as well. So now that we've gotten that piece kind
of squared away, we've kind of talked about how
distributed cloud enables DevOps to be more efficient. One other
thing I want to use this example for here
is innovation, and this is for high value services.
So, let's say I want to do AI or machine learning capabilities,
something that a public cloud will generally offer. So, you know, let's say I
have some AI or ML capabilities that I want to deploy. Well
same as before, I can take those capabilities and deploy
them to any of these environments. So with distributed cloud
you're able to innovate with capabilities generally only
available in public cloud, in environments outside of the public
cloud. It's one of the key capabilities. The last one I want to talk about today
is governance.
Now governance is a key requirement for pretty much all companies, but especially
you know financial institutions, or health or insurance companies,
basically concerns like data regulations, compliance, data locality.
How can a Security Admin effectively and with a single control plane
manage policies across the board? Well time to put on my last hat here. Let's
say that I'm a Security Admin and I've created a network policy.
So, this network policy, let's say that it handles things like RBAC,
or network policies across the board, or security policies,
and I want to deploy them to clusters everywhere in my business,
not just in the cloud, but also on-prem and edge.
Well, with the distributed cloud you can do exactly that.
By taking advantage of the capabilities made available I can deploy these
policies across the board to any of these
environments. Now this is a simple example,
but it goes to show you how distributed cloud is tackling problems
that hybrid cloud generally runs into. Thanks for joining me for this quick
overview of distributed cloud. If you've enjoyed this video and you
want to see more like this in the future be sure to drop a like or a comment
below. To see what IBM is doing in the
distributed cloud space be sure to check out IBM Cloud Satellite.
Thank you for watching.