LORD OF THE CLOUDS
Cloud adoption moves far beyond the middle-earth realm of cloud migration, now also driven by sustainability, distribution, sovereignty, “FinOps” and multi-cloud forces – all for that precious, better business flow
The cloud cannot be commanded to turn back. It has set on a journey – accelerated by the pandemic – only further building strength and velocity. It infuses all areas of an organization, weaves its way through to the core, and applies itself through varied interconnected and distributed cloud options. A static, eternal place around the central throne is no longer a given for the cloud. To flow with the business is a matter of seamless fusion between technology and operational capabilities – driving innovation, growth, agility, trust, financial transparency, and sustainability. Now there’s a quest worth embarking on.
Daniel Koopman Expert in Residence
WHAT
- Different regulatory requirements, the need for unique services, and the emergence of more loosely coupled, “mesh” business models drives the move towards truly hybrid, multi-cloud and non-cloud mixes.
- With connectivity infusing every aspect of business, a single cloud and network is bound to be flooded. Workloads must be more distributed to industry-focused platforms, sovereign clouds, and operational technology edge devices.
- As around $25 billion is spent on cloud every quarter, a unified perspective (“FinOps”) is needed towards transparent financial cloud controls – balancing business impact, accountability of stakeholders, manageability, and budget flows.
- A growing proportion of global electricity is consumed by established data centers. In contrast, cloud-native suppliers see massive reductions in carbon emissions, marking the way towards a more sustainable, zero-carbon computing future.
- High-performance, distributed ledger technologies emerge as agile alternatives to industry leading “Hyperscaler” cloud platforms, focusing on personal sovereignty and privacy, built-in security, superior sustainability, and cost.
USE
- Google is using AI to optimize geothermal plants and wind farm efficiency and distribute workloads to the location of cleanest energy, aiming to be carbon-free by 2030.
- In Singapore, two universities within the Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed are looking to cut energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25%.
- Atlassian, a collaboration software company, created a visual indicator of where Reserved Instances coverage becomes high enough to yield significant savings.
- Microsoft’s real-time visual analysis allows researchers to assess biodiversity and inner-city traffic patterns by tying cloud, edge, and high-speed networking with AI.
- Capgemini, Orange, and Microsoft created a French cloud service to meet sovereignty requirements of the French State through a ”Cloud de Confiance.”
- Google Data Centers reduced the amount of energy used by 40% by leveraging DeepMind’s machine learning system.
IMPACT
- Optimized cloud usage – especially when achieved in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence – will deliver significant savings in energy consumption, reducing carbon emissions.
- Through cloud financial management (“FinOps”) and better visibility of cloud usage, significant cost reductions can be achieved. Wildlife Studios managed to cut their cloud costs by 45%.
- A hybrid mix of cloud options enables sovereignty, trust, and data ownership. This enables an agile, unified ecosystem of cloud and data services – where applicable – protected by data protection laws.
- A multi-cloud setup – in combination with software-driven Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) – not only delivers agility, but also boosts cloud user satisfaction, easy access, and versatile changes of scale when business so dictates.
TECH
- Sustainability tools: Microsoft Sustainability calculator, CodeCarbon, SIMAP, Google Cloud Picker
- Hybrid, multi-cloud tools: Google Anthos, Azure Arc, Sentry, Backstage, Crossplane, Cilium, Kubevela, RedHat Advance Cluster Manager, embotics, scalr, OpenNebula
- Industry and sovereign clouds: Lumen platform, IBM Satellite, ONAP, Azure Germany, GAIA-X
- Cost management (“FinOps”): Apptio, Spot.io, Harness Cloud Cost Management, Kubecost, Cloudhealth by VMWare
- Distributed cloud and application ledgers: Solana, Dfinity, Akash