Today’s Evolving Cloud Strategies Are Embracing Distributed Computing

As cloud platforms provide a foundation for emerging technology initiatives and innovations, those innovations in turn shape the continued development of cloud strategies.

The demonstrated value of placing workloads and data closer to end users, for example, has made distributed computing an increasingly important consideration in enterprise IT strategy — with key use cases including processing and distributing media, collecting and analyzing user or sensor data, delivering low-latency gaming, and providing transactional applications. This consideration is driving enterprise cloud footprints to encompass a more distributed continuum of venues, ranging from core cloud environments to edge locations.

Distributed computing requirements expand the boundaries of established cloud wisdom. 

In the early days of cloud computing, the focus was on migrating workloads into centralized environments and adapting applications to fit cloud concepts of provisioning and pricing. 

Subsequent cloud use cases make the precise location of compute and storage resources, as well as the availability of the resources and the ease of connectivity among them, more important. Evolving cloud principles — such as hybrid and multicloud, application modularization, and standardization on cloud-native architectures — have also emerged as building blocks that support distributed computing use cases.

For many organizations, the evolution of cloud strategy will require embracing the full range of infrastructure environments and accommodating the ever-expanding "extended enterprise" that shifts organizational boundaries far beyond the traditional perimeters of enterprise data centers and centralized public clouds. This evolution may also include new application architectures and approaches, as well as new cloud suppliers that better fit distributed computing requirements. 

Data will likely be the driving factor in this evolution. How and where data is collected, stored, analyzed, and distributed will determine the best execution venue for specific workloads and applications. 

The continuum of cloud infrastructure and services from core to edge is well-established. Cloud architectures exist in all venues. Cloud-native constructs, such as Kubernetes, span private and public environments. Many computing environments that are considered edge infrastructure are built on public cloud platforms.

The frameworks and criteria for workload placement established as part of enterprise cloud strategies — application requirements related to performance, security, and specific dependencies, as well as business considerations related to cost, risk, and compliance — are all relevant in a more distributed cloud context. 

However, they must also be adapted to consider the impacts of an increasingly large pool of potential venues, which can introduce both opportunities and challenges around cost, security, and other requirements.

Existing investments in cloud have given organizations a basis for incorporating new venues and environments into a more holistic approach to making infrastructure decisions on a per-workload basis.

As enterprises seek increasingly effective solutions for applications and use cases with specific requirements around geographic placement, latency, and connectivity, they encounter physical resource constraints that cloud computing would otherwise seek to abstract. These constraints will create more expectations for existing cloud platforms and, in some cases, an appetite for new cloud platforms and services.

In such cases, cloud strategies may evolve in the direction of platform architectures that prioritize distribution of resources — or, perhaps, a more granular distribution (such as smaller, more distributed cloud locations) than the current standard approach (large availability zones centralized within certain regions). These new strategies may also favor cloud infrastructure services that offer a greater variety of network capabilities or integrate those connectivity and interconnection capabilities more seamlessly.

Enterprise cloud strategies will continue to evolve, driven by the broadening spectrum of business and technology demands. A more distributed architecture is a facet of that evolution that will stretch the limits of existing cloud thinking and expand options for where and how applications can be deployed, establish new standards for performance and experience, and enable the execution of projects that were previously impossible.