Cloud Forecast: Where It’s Been and Where It’s Heading
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to hybrid cloud computing spanning multiple platforms is that, most of the time, the IT environments in question are very different from one another. For example, VMware may dominate the enterprise. But in the realm of the public cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes use of its own variant of the open source Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM).
To make it simpler to move workloads between these environments, ZeroStack today added a workload migration capability to its cloud management platform that via a single click makes it possible to move workloads running on VMware ESX hypervisor to a KVM environment that makes use of application programming interfaces (APIs) defined by the open source OpenStack cloud platform.
Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing for ZeroStack, says IT organizations want to be able to dynamically move workloads between multiple clouds based on cost and application performance requirements. Today, however, moving a workload from one cloud to another requires Herculean efforts on the part of the internal IT organization.
“We’re making it easier to move workloads in and out of the cloud,” says Garrison.
ZeroStack itself is delivered on a converged appliance running OpenStack that is managed via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that eliminates a lot of the IT infrastructure overhead associated with setting up a cloud management platform. As part of that service, the ZeroStack appliance runs an instance of KVM that also provides support for the application programming interfaces (APIs) that AWS uses. Via that appliance, an IT organization can both deploy OpenStack workloads and automate the movement of workloads between VMware and AWS, says Garrison.
Today, most IT organizations are still managing most clouds in isolation from on-premises IT environments. But as it becomes simpler to manage the co-mingling of workloads across multiple cloud environments, interest in hybrid cloud computing should rise.
In the meantime, IT organizations should feel free to keep their workload options open on the assumption that managing the extended enterprise in the age of the cloud is going to soon get much easier.
