Janifha Evangeline | Wednesday, 24 August 2022, 14:33 IST
CUBE recently hosted a technology conference Supercloud 22, which was concluded with an in-depth discussion on the future of cloud technology. A new world is built on top of base cloud computing structures that include IaaS, PaaS, & SaaS, according to industry experts and this emerging trend is being termed supercloud.
Although the term supercloud was mentioned for the 1st time in a study by Cornell University in the year 2016, for most of them it may seem a very new term.
Cornell University defines a supercloud as “a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers”. Spanning across a range of important public clouds that include Google Compute Engine, Amazon EC2, & Microsoft Azure, & private clouds, the supercloud architecture “provides interface to allocate, migrate and terminate resources such as virtual machines and storage and presents a homogenous network to tie these resources together.”
An important feature of Supercloud is that it provides flexibility. It lets users to relocate their virtual machines across numerous data centers across the globe irrespective of the owner & without reconfiguring as well as re-synchronizing their applications. It makes an application to offload from an overloaded data center to another which has an entirely different infrastructure altogether.
The focus on supercloud began gaining ground owing to the challenges which were posed by multi-cloud and even in multi-cloud architectures, enterprises not only struggle to apply consistent security policies across all their applications, but they also find difficulty in migrating apps among different clouds & data centers, optimize the performance of numerous applications & gain insights into the application health in order to know if they are performing up to the mark etc.
One of the key factors that is creating a huge interest around supercloud is its ability to connect across clouds as well as operate in a hybrid & multi-cloud environment. This makes the lives of both developers & end users a lot easier.
While superclouds are known by different names, for instance distributed cloud, they are making it easier for operating in a multi-cloud environment and this enables seamless migration, optimal performance as well as consistent security.
Supercloud in the making
Numerous cloud computing enterprises have already begun to work on architectures that are similar to superclouds although not all of them call such architectures superclouds. Snowflake, a leading cloud computing enterprise is currently working on something they call as ‘data cloud’.
VMware recently came up with VMware Cross-Cloud services with an aim to address the challenges that were posed owing to the lack of consistency across clouds. The Cross-Cloud services comprise cloud management, cloud & edge infrastructure, application development, security & networking, and anywhere workspace solutions. All of these are built on a seamless abstraction layer which spans clouds, and enables enterprises to develop, deploy, run, manage, as well as secure & access apps & infrastructure in a consistent way.
Apart from these there are several other firms that are working towards supercloud. For instance, last year Goldman Sachs Group announced a new data management cloud called the ‘Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data with AWS’, which was a good example of an industry supercloud. And, Dish Network also announced a supercloud to power 5G wireless networks while Cohesity, is in the process of developing a data management supercloud that is mainly focused on data protection & governance.
Security - the biggest challenge
One of the key concerns raised in Supercloud 22 was security since it is the most pressing challenge in realizing the idea of supercloud. Developing a security framework which can keep data safe across several clouds as well as on-premises data centers is a new level of challenge altogether. Although every cloud provider have their own security models & every enterprise has its own security framework for on-prem data centers, integrating these frameworks as well as models across clouds is a daunting task.
The road ahead
An important question arises in the adoption in the near future in the backdrop of numerous superclouds in the making. Industry expert Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Stealth Mode Startup Company, believes that “Although supercloud is transformative and disruptive, it should not be rushed. Standardization can happen a few years down the line.” “Right now, all we need is enough startups to create the super layer abstraction, with the goal in mind of AI automation,” he said.
Industry leaders are of the opinion that stakeholders should collaborate in order to formulate a set of standards based on which data can be shared. Besides they also feel that the security ecosystem has to be led by cloud providers who render the foundational infrastructure elements while the security vendors have to put in place strict/stringent detection norms.
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