Beware of Single Cloud
We’ve been seeing the warning signs of depending on single cloud providers for some time now. Whether it is the vendor lock-in, the costs, or the privacy issues now with the CLOUD Act, nothing hurts more than down time when the cloud provider goes down.
Multicloud Holy Grail
This week outages on Spotify, Snapchat and others due to issues on now Google’s Cloud Platform occurred. Down time hurts worst of all and has driven several large clients away from the single provider model towards multi-cloud. According to Wikipedia’s definition of multicloud,
Multicloud is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single heterogeneous architecture. This also refers to the distribution of cloud assets, software, applications, etc. across several cloud-hosting environments. With a typical multicloud architecture utilizing two or more public clouds as well as multiple private clouds, a multicloud environment aims to eliminate the reliance on any single cloud provider.
This implies the capability to move infrastructure (applications and things they use to operate like databases) without downtime and data loss between multiple cloud providers in response to individual provider outages. Additionally an intelligent broker is need to constantly shop around to optimize cost vs. performance. Doing all that without skipping a heartbeat is really hard. In the end, the cloud platform manages your custom infrastructure as a service across N-different cloud platforms. Multicloud is hard to implement properly especially if it’s not the core pursuit or founding basis to any cloud technology.
Native Multicloud is the Holy Grail
Once the word was out that Multicloud is the “Holy grail of cloud computing”, many vendors started adding multi-cloud functionality on top of their existing platforms. The process got uglier with each cloud provider added, ad hoc, to produce awkward Frankensteins. Security and consistent reliable operation was the first to suffer. If you’re not using a multicloud platform designed from day one, what I call a native multicloud platform, then be weary of running your mission critical infrastructure on it.
You might find that failures and security threats are much more common than going the route of a single cloud provider. At least with a single cloud provider the security surface area does not expand out with unpredictable behavior. The only option is to use a native multicloud solution designed specifically for multicloud. That’s the holy grail, not patched legacy cloud platforms.
Relationship Between P2P Cloud and Multicloud
The benefits and advantages of native multicloud systems were being discussed in academia years before the term was invented under the domain of Peer-to-Peer systems. P2P cloud has been studied and championed by acknowledged academics and acclaimed leaders in open source like Ozalp Babaoglu one of the principal designers of BSD Unix and a professor at the University of Bologna. Prof. Babaoglu has published several papers and articles on P2P cloud.
P2P cloud is N-way native multicloud without any limit on the number of providers. Each peer in a swarm is a provider of resources. Each peer contributes resources to run a segment of the cloud environment with infrastructure and applications. The concept of perpetually migrating infrastructure to maintain a desired state in ephemeral environments is caked into the paradigm. Decentralized security is a central concept. Perpetually searching for resources to satisfy user needs (governance rules) is built in. It is the original theoretical foundation to native multicloud systems. It is the holy grail that everyone is looking for.
Subutai is a P2P Native Multicloud Platform
Subutai is a clean room implementation of a next generation native multicloud platform (a P2P cloud platform) enabled by the blockchain. The blockchain is used to implement a marketplace to find and rent resources across peers while strengthening trust and accountability on the platform’s reputation system. The blockchain provides the last missing part of the puzzle perplexing researchers for some time now.
If you’re curious and interested in being part of the cloud revolution taking place, come join us. Become a provider to rent resources and earn cryptocurrency. Come join the Subutai Horde.
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