While most pundits have fallen in love with public cloud, behind the scenes a variety of technologies and vendors are evolving the will deliver the ultimate clouds, hybrid clouds.
Amazon and Google have done a remarkable job promoting public cloud, as VMware, Cisco and OpenStack have done similarly with private cloud. Yet late last year at the December Gartner Data Center Conference 2012 the dominant theme was neither public cloud nor private cloud, but rather hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud is form of cloud computing whereby applications and services can run across multiple clouds, colocation and data centers seamlessly, as a single hybrid cloud.
Before you dismiss hybrid cloud as another marketing twist on cloudwashing, consider its roots and evolution from the physical data center into an elastic, software-defined data center (as VMware calls it). We started talking about a new, elastic architecture back in 2010 from the context of the necessary evolution of networks to support elastic and dynamic virtual infrastructures, including clouds.