How to Manage Multiple Cloud Relationships
Most IT organizations appear to be voting with their wallets for a three-pronged approach to cloud computing, spanning Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and their own local private cloud. To facilitate the integration of private clouds running in a local data center with public cloud, Velostrata today announced it is adding support for Microsoft Azure alongside existing support for AWS.
Velostrata has developed a framework for integrating VMware environments with AWS by making it simpler to move workloads between those environments without having to copy data between them. Now Velostrata is extending that same capability out to Microsoft Azure.
Ady Degany, chief product officer for Velostrata, says the next major Velostrata effort will enable IT organizations that have standardized on VMware to move application workloads between public clouds without necessarily having their own private cloud in between them.
In general, Degany says, the Velostrata platform levels the cloud playing field by making it simpler for IT organizations to deploy application workloads as they best see fit. IT organizations are not moving application workloads between clouds. But they do want to be able to extract better pricing options from cloud service providers by being able to deploy existing application workloads based on VMware in either AWS or Azure.
“In terms of cloud pricing, you’re seeing IT organizations exercise a lot of creativity,” says Degany.
Of course, the key to being able to maintain public cloud neutrality is to not invoke a lot of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) that cloud service providers expose to entice organizations to use some of their more advanced services. Assuming that level of discipline is maintained, it’s only a matter of time before the fierce competition between cloud service providers gives IT organizations some much needed leverage.
