The rise of hybrid IT environments and widespread multi-cloud adoption for AI, security and global expansion, coupled with forecasts that businesses will spend more than $1 trillion on cloud computing infrastructure this year for the first time, have created an urgent need for organizations to streamline their operations. Supercloud networks propose to do just that.
The term “Supercloud” has been floating around for a few years now and it’s a concept that’s gaining traction in cloud networking. While some might dismiss it as just another buzzword in a sea of technical jargon, Supercloud embodies a vision rather than a specific technology like eBPF or WASM. It aims to untangle the tangled web of management complexities that organizations face due to inherent differences in the tools and APIs needed to deploy, operate, and monitor apps and APIs across different cloud platforms.
To understand the importance of the Supercloud and its potential value, it is critical to understand both the benefits and obstacles of multi-cloud deployments.
Leading engineer and chief evangelist at F5.
What exactly is Supercloud?
In my opinion, “Supercloud at its core is a cloud architecture that enables hybrid IT to seamlessly serve every layer of the IT stack across different cloud providers, traditional on-premises deployments and cloud environments, and at the edge.”
To make this vision a reality, we need to start by addressing the foundational layer of the IT stack: infrastructure. This is the connective tissue between the data center and the public cloud – the network layers that allow consumers to consume, clients to make calls, and packets to move from one place to another. The proposed solution to simplify connectivity is often referred to in the market as multi-cloud networking, or MCN.
Fundamentally, multi-cloud networking simplifies connectivity by standardizing the way networks are built and operate across all environments – whether in a public or private cloud, in the data center or even at the edge. By creating a unified network fabric across all properties and when approached strategically, multi-cloud networking can help organizations eliminate the complexity of multi-cloud environments. It achieves this by using consistent architectures, configurations, and management consoles to operate and monitor across all locations. This approach improves security, performance, and scalability, allowing businesses to adapt more quickly to changing demands.
However, not all multi-cloud networking solutions offer the same capabilities. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the solution for both security and application performance optimization capabilities, and to connect multiple properties.
Evaluate the solution
For many businesses that look beyond the time and money saving potential of cloud migration, there will still be significant challenges. These often revolve around security and data protection issues. So without comprehensive security measures, the solution only eliminates some of the complexity, while the challenge of applying consistent security across all applications remains unsolved. As a result, organizations risk leaving applications vulnerable to cyber threats, which undermines the integrity of their entire IT infrastructure. That said, incorporating these Supercloud services into a multi-cloud networking solution further streamlines operations by providing scannable tools and a unified management console.
Complexity created by the need to optimize application performance is equally important to address – since no one connects clouds just for the fun of connecting clouds. Organizations leverage multiple clouds to achieve global reach, or to accelerate growth by scaling rapidly, or today to take advantage of AI services to gain a competitive edge. So as the need to adopt new platforms and as-a-service offerings grows, optimizing application performance is critical to maximizing the benefits of multi-cloud environments.
Those applications ultimately mean applications and APIs – and applications need application services. These are security and delivery technologies that optimize, secure, and scale applications and APIs. They’re part of the connective tissue, often emerging as proxy-based solutions that provide capabilities like identifying and stopping bots, defending against DDoS, and automatically adjusting delivery location to ensure the best possible user experience.
These services also add to the complex tangle of yarn that often makes delivering digital services a frustrating – and costly – task today. Multi-cloud networks that include application services as an integral part of the solution can offer the same benefits of standardization as the network – lower costs, similar tools, and a single console to manage them.
Tackling the Complexity of Multi-Cloud
In summary, the ideal multi-cloud networking solution must address the following challenges customers face when operating across multiple cloud and data center environments:
1. Ensure consistent security across all applications and APIs
2. Managing the complexity and costs associated with various tools, APIs, and consoles
3. Optimize application performance
For nearly a decade, these challenges have topped the list of multi-cloud challenges. Supercloud aims to address these issues, with multi-cloud networking serving as the foundational building block to realize this vision.
Multi-cloud networks must be designed to address the complexity of multi-cloud operations and pave the way for a streamlined approach to hybrid IT management.
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