Interestingly, two of the really big cloud players in the IaaS segment (Infrastructure as a Service), Amazon Web Services and Google with its cloud platform , are not even on the list; Microsoft only makes it into the midfield with Azure . One explanation for this could be that these providers are currently unlikely to be interested in selling management software for competing cloud services to their customers.
Hybrid cloud management - two use
cases
Bartoletti sees two basic application scenarios for the
hybrid cloud software packages. The first case is about managing multi-public
cloud environments. In practice, for example, it often happens that an
organization uses Amazon Web Services in some departments or developer teams.
If, for example, the marketing department wants to quickly scale a new mobile
or Java app, AWS is a good choice. On the other hand, there may be developers
who are used to working in a Windows environment and therefore prefer Azure .
In this constellation, a uniform cloud management system could provide both
cloud platforms with virtual machines and storage. At the same time wouldIT
Enables those responsible to make cloud usage transparent and to control it.
From Forrester's point of view, a second use case for hybrid
cloud software arises when several teams within an organization use the same
public cloud, for example AWS . In this case, the management software could
serve as a central portal for access to AWS resources and provide IT monitoring
functions.
In an international survey,
almost two thirds of IT professionals stated that they used more than one
public or private cloud at the same time. In order to still be able to control
all these assets, companies should move in a management software layer, advises
Bartoletti.
The tools are still in the
"maturity phase"
The relevant tools are all still in the "maturity
phase", points out Bartoletti. For him, the ideal situation would have
been reached if companies could manage multiple clouds with a single system and
dynamically move workloads back and forth between the clouds. But there is
still a extensive way to go until then. Today, dynamic distribution of
workloads typically only works in homogeneous environments. For example,
"vMotion" offers some of these features as long as users move in a
pure VMware environment that links vSphere with vCloudAir. It becomes much more
difficult if, for example, applications are distributed across AWS and Azure .