SuperCloud: The 2022 Answer to Multi-Cloud Challenges

This article is translated from "Supercloud: The 2022 Answer to Multi-Cloud Challenges"[1] by Lori MacVittie.

SuperCloud, also called distributed cloud, aims to simplify multi‑cloud environments and unlock the full potential of the "cloud".

Although business leaders recognize the benefits of moving to the cloud—more elastic infrastructure and stronger platforms—the migration process still faces significant challenges.

Enterprises now encounter greater complexity because they operate in multi‑cloud settings, often using an average of 2.16 different environments. Two key findings emerge:

Almost every cloud‑adopting enterprise uses multiple clouds.

All of these enterprises face "multi‑cloud operations" challenges.

With the rise of edge and distributed cloud, this complexity will increase. Only about one‑third (35%) of enterprises rely on a single environment, usually a private core cloud; the rest spread workloads across core, cloud, and edge locations, and roughly 10% run workloads in all three.

Focus on Multi‑Cloud

Enterprises confront multiple challenges across performance, security, and observability:

Applying consistent security policies across all applications.

Seamlessly migrating applications between cloud and data‑center environments.

Understanding application health (status, performance, capacity).

Optimizing application efficiency.

These challenges have long been evident to IT teams, prompting the emergence of a leading solution known as "SuperCloud".

SuperCloud is now widely adopted, but what exactly is it?

According to Cornell University, SuperCloud is a cloud architecture that enables application migration across different availability zones or cloud providers. It provides interfaces for allocating, migrating, and terminating virtual machines and storage, and offers a homogeneous network that binds these resources together, spanning major public clouds such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, as well as private clouds.

Vendors offering such solutions sometimes label them "distributed cloud," a term that can be misleading because distributed cloud also encompasses an expanding set of edge options. The rapid adoption of edge services—beyond traditional "edge 1.0"—includes digital experience workloads (web front‑ends), data‑processing workloads, and security services like DDoS protection and Web‑API protection (WAAP).

Regardless of whether the workload runs in cloud or edge, multi‑cloud challenges persist. The ability to uniformly operate and monitor workloads across multiple environments remains a major difficulty for many enterprises.

Standardizing security policies and APIs across cloud and edge providers is an ongoing need. As enterprises continue digital transformation and expand globally, near‑real‑time deployment of diverse workloads becomes essential. The resulting multi‑cloud chaos calls for a better solution than the traditional model that relies on deep product‑specific expertise.

Focusing on an abstraction layer that normalizes cloud and edge provider APIs and security policies will greatly help address challenges that have plagued enterprises for over a decade.

In summary, whether called SuperCloud or distributed cloud, the goal is the same: simplify multi‑cloud environments and unleash the "cloud"—enabling seamless migration, consistent security, and optimal performance.

Reference

[1] Original article: https://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/supercloud-2022-answer-multi-cloud-challenges?ng_gateway_return=true&full=true