Metacloud

[paserbyp]

Terms that are beginning to emerge, such as “supercloud,” “distributed cloud,” “metacloud”, and “abstract cloud.” Even the term “cloud native” is up for debate. The common pattern seems to be a collection of public clouds and sometimes edge-based systems that work together for some greater purpose.

The metacloud concept will be the single focus for the next 5 to 10 years as we begin to put public clouds to work. Having a collection of cloud services managed with abstraction and automation is much more valuable than attempting to leverage each public cloud provider on its terms rather than yours.

We want to leverage public cloud providers through abstract interfaces to access specific services, such as storage, compute, artificial intelligence, data, etc., and we want to support a layer of cloud-spanning technology that allows us to use those services more effectively. A metacloud removes the complexity that multicloud brings these days. Also, scaling operations to support multicloud would not be cost-effective without this cross-cloud layer of technology.

Thus, we’ll only have a single layer of security, governance, operations, and even application development and deployment. This is really what a multicloud should become. If we attempt to build more silos using proprietary tools that only work within a single cloud, we’ll need many of them. We’re just building more complexity that will end up making multicloud more of a liability than an asset.

I really don’t care what we call it and however, this does not change the fact that metacloud is perhaps the most important architectural evolution occurring right now, and we need to get this right out of the gate. If we do that, who cares what it is named.