Introducing the main players in the field

We have been talking about public and private clouds. Although it’s probably clear what we commonly understand by these terms, it’s still a good idea to have a very clear definition of both. We adhere to the definition as presented on the Microsoft website (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-cloud-computing): the public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet, making them available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them. The private cloud is defined as computing services offered either over the internet or a private internal network and only to select users instead of the general public. There are many more definitions, but these serve our purpose very well.

Public clouds

In the public cloud, the best-known providers are AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud, next to a number of public clouds that have OpenStack as their technological foundation. An example of OpenStack is Rackspace. These are all public clouds that fit the definition that we just gave, but they also have some major differences.

AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer a wide variety of managed services to build environments, but they all differ very much in the way you apply the technology. In short: the concepts are more or less alike, but under the hood, these are completely different beasts. It’s exactly this that makes managing multi-cloud solutions complex.

In this book, we will mainly focus on the major players in the multi-cloud portfolio.

Private clouds

Most companies are planning to move, or are actually in the midst of moving, their workloads to the cloud. In general, they have a selected number of major platforms that they choose to host the workloads: Azure, AWS, GCP, and that’s about it. Fair enough, there are more platforms, but the three mentioned are the most dominant ones, and will continue to be throughout the forthcoming decades, if we look at analysts’ reports. Yet, we will also address Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Alibaba Cloud in this book when appropriate and when adding valuable extra information, since both clouds have gained quite some market growth over the recent years.

As we already found out in the previous paragraphs, in planning for and migrating workloads to these platforms, organizations also discover that it gets complex. Even more important, there are more and more regulations in terms of compliance, security, and privacy that force these companies to think twice before they bring our data onto these platforms. And it’s all about the data, in the end. It’s the most valuable asset in any company—next to people.

In the private cloud, VMware seems to be the dominant platform, next to environments that have Microsoft with Hyper-V technology as their basis. Yet, Microsoft is pushing customers more and more toward consumption in Azure, and where systems need to be kept on-premises, they have a broad portfolio available with Azure Stack and Azure Arc, which we will discuss in a bit more detail later in this chapter.

Especially in European governmental environments, OpenStack still seems to do very well, to avoid having data controlled or even viewed by non-European companies. However, the adoption and usage of OpenStack seem to be declining.

The following diagram provides an example of a multi-cloud stack, dividing private from public clouds.

Figure 1.2: An example multi-cloud portfolio: the main players

In this section, we will look briefly at both VMware and OpenStack as private stack foundations. After that, we’ll have a deeper look at AWS Outposts and Google Anthos. Basically, both propositions extend the public clouds of AWS and GCP into a privately owned datacenter. Next to this, we have to mention Azure Arc, which extends Azure to anywhere, either on-premises onto other clouds.

Outposts is an appliance that comes as a preconfigured rack with compute, storage, and network facilities. Anthos by Google is more a set of components that can be utilized to specifically host container platforms in on-premises environments using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Finally, in this section, we will have a look at the Azure Stack portfolio.

VMware

In essence, VMware is still a virtualization technology. It started off with the virtualization of x86-based physical servers, enabling multiple virtual machines Virtual Machines (VMs) on one physical host. Later, VMware introduced the same concept to storage with virtualized SAN (vSAN) and network virtualization and security (NSX), which virtualizes the network, making it possible to adopt micro-segmentation in private clouds.

The company has been able to constantly find ways to move along with the shift to the cloud—as an example, by developing a proposition together with AWS where VMware private clouds can be seamlessly extended to the public cloud. The same applies to Azure: the joint offering is Azure VMware Solution (AVS).

VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) was a jointly developed proposition by AWS and VMware, but today Azure and VMware also supply migration services to migrate VMware workloads to Azure. VMware, acquired by Broadcom in 2022, has developed new services to stay relevant in the cloud. It has become a strong player in the field of containerization with the Tanzu portfolio, for instance. Over the last few years, the company has also strengthened its position in the security domain, again targeting the multi-cloud stack.

OpenStack

There absolutely are benefits to OpenStack. It’s a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly used as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). OpenStack uses KVM as its main hypervisor, although there are more hypervisors available for OpenStack. It was—and still is, with a group of companies and institutions—popular since it offers a stable, scalable solution while avoiding vendor lock-in on the major cloud and technology providers. Major integrators and system providers such as IBM and Fujitsu adopted OpenStack in their respective cloud platforms, Bluemix and K5 (K5 was decommissioned internationally in 2018).

However, although OpenStack is open source and can be completely tweaked and tuned to specific business needs, it is also complex, and companies find it cumbersome to manage. Most of these OpenStack platforms do not have the richness of solutions that, for example, Azure, AWS, and GCP offer to their clients. Over the last few years, OpenStack seems to have lost its foothold in the enterprise world, yet it still has a somewhat relevant position and certain aspects are therefore considered in this book.

AWS Outposts

Everything you run on the AWS public cloud, you can now run on an appliance, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), databases, and even Kubernetes clusters with Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It all seamlessly integrates with the virtual private cloud (VPC) that you would have deployed in the public cloud, using the same APIs and controls. That is, in a nutshell, AWS Outposts: the AWS public cloud on-premises.

One question might be what this means for the VMConAWS proposition that both VMware and AWS have in their portfolio. VMConAWS actually extends the private cloud to the public cloud, based on HCX by VMware. VMware uses bare-metal instances in AWS to which it deploys vSphere, vSAN storage, and NSX for software-defined networking.

You can also use AWS services on top of the configuration of VMConAWS through integration with AWS. Outposts works exactly the other way around: bringing AWS to the private cloud. The portfolio for Outposts is growing rapidly. Customers can buy small appliances with single servers and also so-called rack solutions. In both cases, the infrastructure is completely managed by AWS.

Google Anthos

Anthos brings Google Cloud—or more accurately, GKE—to the on-premises datacenter, just as Azure Stack does for Azure and Outposts for AWS, but it focuses on the use of Kubernetes as a landing platform, moving and converting workloads directly into containers using GKE. It’s not a standalone box like Azure Stack or Outposts. The solution runs on top of virtualized machines using vSphere and is more of a Platform of a Service (PaaS) solution. Anthos really accelerates the transformation of applications to more cloud-native environments, using open-source technology including Istio for microservices and Knative for the scaling and deployment of cloud-native apps on Kubernetes.

More information on the specifics of Anthos can be found at https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/on-prem/how-to/vsphere-requirements-basic.

Azure Stack

The Azure Stack portfolio contains Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Stack Hub, and Stack Edge.

The most important feature of Azure Stack HCI is that it can run “disconnected” from Azure, running offline without internet connectivity. Stack HCI is delivered as a service, providing the latest security and feature updates.

To put it very simply: HCI works like the commonly known branch office server. Basically, HCI is a box that contains compute power, storage, and network connections. The box holds Hyper-V-based virtualized workloads that you can manage with Windows Admin Center. So, why would you want to run this as Azure Stack then? Well, Azure Stack HCI also has the option to connect to Azure services, such as Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, Microsoft Defender (formerly Azure Security Center), and Azure Monitor.

It’s a very simple solution that only requires Microsoft-validated hardware, the installation of the Azure Stack operating system plus Windows Admin Center, and optionally an Azure account to connect to specific Azure cloud services.

Pre-warning: it might get a bit complicated from this point onward. Azure Stack HCI is also the foundation of Azure Stack Hub. Yet, Hub is a different solution. Whereas you can run Stack HCI standalone, Hub as a solution is integrated with the Azure public cloud—and that’s really a different ballgame. It’s not possible to upgrade HCI to Hub.

Azure Stack Hub is an extension of Azure that brings the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment. Almost everything you can do in the public cloud of Microsoft, you could also deploy on Hub: from VMs to apps, all managed through the Azure portal or even PowerShell. It all really works like Azure, including things such as configuring and updating fault domains. Hub also supports having an availability set with a maximum of three fault domains to be consistent with Azure. This way, you can create high availability on Hub just as you would in Azure.

The perfect use case for Hub and the Azure public cloud would be to do development on the public cloud and move production to Hub, should apps or VMs need to be hosted on-premises for compliance reasons. The good news is that you can configure your pipeline in such a manner that development and testing can be executed on the public cloud and run deployment of the validated production systems, including the desired state configuration, on Hub. This will work fine since both entities of the Azure platform use the Azure resource providers in a consistent way.

There are a few things to be aware of, though. The compute resource provider will create its own VMs on Hub. In other words: it does not copy the VM from the public cloud to Hub. The same applies to network resources. Hub will create its own network features such as load balancers, vNets, and network security groups (NSGs). As for storage, Hub allows you to deploy all storage forms that you would have available on the Azure public cloud, such as blobs, queues, and tables. Obviously, we will discuss all of this in much more detail in this book, so don’t worry if a number of terms don’t sound familiar at this time.

One last Stack product is Stack Edge. Edge makes it easy to send data to Azure. But Edge does more: it runs containers to enable data analyses, perform queries, and filter data at edge locations. Therefore, Edge supports Azure VMs and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters, which you can run containers on.

Edge, for that matter, is quite a sophisticated solution since it also integrates with Azure Machine Learning (AML). You can build and train machine learning models in Azure, run them in Azure Stack Edge, and send the datasets back to Azure. For this, the Edge solution is equipped with the Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) required to speed up building and (re)training the models.

Having said this, the obvious use case comes with the implementation of data analytics and machine learning where you don’t want raw data to be uploaded to the public cloud straight away.

Azure Arc

There’s one more service that needs to be discussed at this point and that’s Azure Arc, launched at Ignite 2019. Azure Arc allows you to manage and govern at scale the following resource types hosted outside of Azure: servers, Kubernetes clusters, and SQL Server instances. In addition, Azure Arc allows you to run Azure data services anywhere using Kubernetes as clusters for containers, use GitOps to deploy configuration across the Kubernetes clusters from Git repositories, and manage these non-Azure workloads as if they were fully deployed on Azure itself.

If you want to connect a machine to Arc, you need to install an agent on that machine. It will then get a resource ID and become part of a resource group in your Azure tenant. However, this won’t happen until you’ve configured some settings in the network, such as a proxy allowing for traffic from and to Arc-controlled servers, and registered the appropriate resource providers. The Microsoft.HybridCompute, Microsoft.GuestConfiguration, and Microsoft.HybridConnectivity resource providers must be registered on your subscription. This only has to be done once.

If you perform the actions successfully, then you can have non-Azure machines managed through Azure. In practice, this means that you perform many operational functions, just as you would with native Azure virtual machines. That sort of defines the use case: managing the non-Azure machines in line with the same policies as the Azure machines. These do not necessarily have to be on-premises. That’s likely the best part of Arc: Azure Arc-enabled servers let you manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, on your corporate network, or on another cloud provider (such as AWS or GCP, but not exclusively).

With that last remark on Arc, we’ve come to the core of the multi-cloud discussion, and that’s integration. All of the platforms that we’ve studied in this chapter have advantages, disadvantages, dependencies, and even specific use cases. Hence, we see enterprises experimenting with and deploying workloads in more than one cloud. That’s not just to avoid cloud vendor lock-in: it’s mainly because there’s not a “one size fits all” solution.

In short, it should be clear that it’s really not about cloud-first. It’s about getting cloud-fit, that is, getting the best out of an ever-increasing variety of cloud solutions. This book will hopefully help you to master working with a mix of these solutions.

Emerging players

Looking at the cloud market, it’s clear that it is dominated by a few major players, that is, the ones that were mentioned before: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. However, a number of players are emerging in both the public and private clouds, for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is geographical and that finds its cause in compliance rules. Some industries or companies in specific countries are not allowed to use, for instance, American cloud providers. Or the provider must have a local presence in a specific country.

From China, two major players have emerged to the rest of the world: Alibaba Cloud and Tencent. Both have been leading providers in China for many years, but are also globally available, but they focus on the Chinese market. Alibaba Cloud, especially, can certainly compete with the major American providers, offering a wide variety of services.

In Europe, a new initiative has recently started with Gaia-X, providing a pure European cloud, based in the EU. Gaia-X seems to concentrate mainly on the healthcare industry to allow European healthcare institutions to use a public cloud and still have privacy-sensitive patient data hosted within the EU.

Finally, big system integrators have stepped into the cloud market as well. A few have found niches in the market, such as IBM Cloud, which collaborates with Red Hat. Japanese technology provider Fujitsu did offer global cloud services with K5 for a while, offering a fully OpenStack public cloud, but found itself not being able to compete with Azure or AWS without enormous investments.

For specific use cases, a number of these clouds will offer good solutions, but the size and breadth of the services typically don’t match those of the major public providers.

Where appropriate, new players will be discussed in this book. In the next section, we will first study the various cloud service models.