In tech, you always see new technologies talked about before it’s actually in enterprises. This is largely based on marketing efforts to get a product out and about into the world. For example, with Kubernetes, there was a lot of marketing around why it was important before many organizations were even using it.

One of the newest tech pieces that have gone from its all marketing to oh, okay; Organizations actually need this is hybrid cloud.

In this blog post, you’ll learn about how Hybrid Cloud came to be and what software organizations are leading the effort.

At First It Was “No Cloud”

Many engineers and administrators will remember when virtualization started coming out. There were several people in datacenters saying something along the lines of this whole virtualization thing is cool for testing, but we’ll never use it in production.

The first rule of a new piece of tech is to never underestimate its value.

With the cloud, it was no different. Although engineers were more open to the idea of the cloud, there were plenty of people that didn’t think it would be as big as it is now.

There was always a twist though; regardless of what big software organizations were telling everyone, a lot of companies still needed servers and infrastructure on-prem. Whether it was Active Directory servers, print servers, large databases, or even latency concerns.

Cloud became a huge deal, but there was always something in the back of everyone’s mind; what do we do with our existing infrastructure?

Then It Was “Cloud For All”

I believe it was somewhere around 2014-early 2016 that we started to see practically zero messaging around Systems Administrator in the standard infrastructure sense and more of the “CLOUD WILL BE IN EVERYONE'S HOME” talk. There was no more talk about Windows Server or Active Directory.

It was all cloud.

Even Microsoft decided to remove the MCSA and MCSE exams because there was a huge push for cloud-only.

Here’s the thing, that doesn’t work. It goes back to the piece in the At First It Was “No Cloud” section; organizations still have infrastructure on-prem.

If you take a huge organization that has literally hundreds of thousands of servers and tell them Hey, move everything to the cloud. We’re no longer your on-prem-friend, that doesn’t work. Not only will business continuity suffer, but educating staff will suffer as well. Take away tech education and most organizations find themselves being run by experience from 10+ years ago.

Will most organizations eventually be out of data centers and into some cloud service? Sure, eventually. That’s not happening anytime soon though.

There must be a solution that solves both problems

Enter Hybrid Cloud.

Hybrid Cloud Is Here

The “big 3” cloud organizations caught on and realized that it’s not a reality to have most large organizations move everything to the cloud. For startups and small organizations, sure, it makes sense. Why? Because there’s no reason for a startup to run an application on-prem and handle the data center costs when they can pop the code into AWS Lambda or an EC2 instance.

Funny enough, Microsoft put the AZ-800 back on the table, which is a hybrid-cloud administrator certification that has a ton of on-prem exposure in it.

Here are the current hybrid cloud solutions:

• Azure == Azure Stack HCI
• GCP == Google Anthos
• AWS == AWS Outposts

All three solutions do one thing; allow you to run your on-prem cloud infrastructure from wherever, and manage it via the cloud.

As an example, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) runs in the cloud, but some organizations that are on-prem want to create cloud-native apps as well. They want to use platforms like Kubernetes. What Azure Stack HCI does is it runs on-prem in your data center and connects to the cloud. That way, you can run AKS on Azure Stack HCI as if you were running it in the cloud. You can also manage your on-prem servers inside of Azure. It’s a true hybrid experience.

Closing Thoughts

Cloud is here to stay, but so is on-prem. There’s not going to be a reality for a long time that has zero on-prem in it. In one way or another, many large organizations will always have something on-prem.

Startups on the other hand will start in the cloud and most likely stay there.