The Rise of Superclouds: Abstracting the Multicloud's Underlying Complexities
- By Stuart Fisher, Couchbase
- August 29, 2022
Over the past two years, cloud adoption has surged as businesses worldwide transitioned to a virtual work environment and adopted digital services due to the limitations posed by the global pandemic. While companies are now returning to the physical space, many have retained their adopted virtual practices. Businesses continue capitalizing on digitalization initiatives to drive agility and resiliency, supported by a dynamic hybrid work environment. This is giving rise to a new world of clouds: superclouds.
Superclouds have generated a lot of buzz in the tech world recently. Sometimes referred to as the distributed cloud, the supercloud is a cloud architecture built on top of a hyper-scale infrastructure that integrates the three types of cloud computing — infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) — into one expedient solution. With a special focus on more extensive business integration and digital transformation of industries, the supercloud taps the underlying primitives of hyper-scale clouds.
According to GlobalData, enterprises in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region have accelerated cloud adoption initiatives. They are considering more complex initiatives such as multicloud and network management to generate better outcomes. Meanwhile, McKinsey notes that the region’s diverse levels of market maturity, cloud adoption patterns, and local regulations pose challenges to the region's businesses striving to maximize the benefits of the cloud. However, the transition to a more digital work environment has given rise to several challenges, as the vast array of products and services of a modern cloud-based environment is composed of many parts with an ecosystem of intertwined technologies.
With so many functions happening within the cloud ecosystem, complexity is a logical byproduct. This has birthed new ways to operationalize IT on cloud technologies and to help build business success. As multicloud adoption grows, abstraction via the supercloud offers avenues to overcome underlying complexities.
Supercloud, the ultramodern solution to multicloud challenges
Supporting businesses through software consumed as services, the supercloud is designed to run on a single hyper cloud or span across multiple clouds. This allows companies to allocate, migrate, and terminate resources, offering a homogenous network where all these resources are available. Essentially, the supercloud delivers above and beyond what public cloud providers expect.
According to IDC, almost 60% of businesses in the Asia Pacific will deploy multicloud operations within the coming two years. Undeniably, this strategy optimizes the cost and capabilities of cloud technology for organizations. However, it is also not unbeknownst to users that using multiple clouds can create unnecessary complexity, like isolated silos, which brings forth other interoperability challenges that make data management more onerous. This results in latency when moving from one cloud to another, especially when sharing, governing, and securing data.
One must consider extending supercloud to the edge to keep data synchronized across different environments. Without syncing, it would be impossible to maintain stability in the user experience that is central to the concept. The edge comes with challenges such as unreliable network connectivity and disruptions; conflicts could potentially occur when updates are done to the same piece of data simultaneously by different users.
Given that the supercloud integrates IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in one convenient solution, it offers seamless services across multiple clouds. It eliminates the complexity of working in one or more clouds while streamlining operations and keeping the data secure. Ultimately, it drives business efficiency and productivity.
Additionally, the supercloud may be optimized to focus on a specific challenge it aims to address. For instance, an enterprise can optimize it for latency, bandwidth, data recovery, query performance, cost, or whichever utility the supercloud can offer to specific needs.
Use cases for workloads that run in superclouds offer more holistic and comprehensive services, including analytics, data science, and network routing. It also includes a converged database, which can be optimized for low latency.
Capella expands the cloud to the edge with Arm-based platforms, delivering flexibility across different use cases with built-in multi-model and mobile synchronization capabilities. With its memory-first architecture that drives millisecond data response at scale, organizations can future-proof the business as it provides solutions to development, architecture, or deployment challenges.
Despite the multicloud’s capabilities to maximize business efficiency and optimize costs, a multicloud strategy may still pose data management challenges. Optimizing superclouds depending on the organization's needs can be a game changer.
Future-proofing the business with supercloud
Operating consistently and monitoring applications across different cloud environments remain an issue for many organizations, regardless of whether enterprises operate at the edge or in the cloud. While the supercloud offers a complex system with a wide variety of use cases, it does not promise complex operational management.
Accelerated global adoption of the cloud has set in motion the rapid transformation of the business landscape. More cloud providers are expected to venture into offering superclouds soon, and many of them already do. Given the pace of digitalization, the rise of superclouds is pivotal in empowering organizations to release their fear of cloud complexity and simplify deployments on their cloud journey.
Stuart Fisher, regional vice president for the Asia Pacific and Japan at Couchbase, wrote this article.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/Elen11