Cloud computing has won and most companies are using more than one public and private clouds. This has created challenges and complexity which are addressed by new technology such as Istio service mesh.
Internet continues to be the source of innovation, not only in changing business models in transportation, hospitality, and media, but in our hardware and software for cloud computing
Need for scale trumped need for speed resulted in data centers of thousands of rack mounted machines. Previous generations of mainframes and supercomputers including the Connection machine which I helped to design and program are on now only on display only in museums.
So cloud computing has clearly won and everyone is adapting to the new world: 85% either using or evaluating public cloud, and of those, 94% multiple clouds…
Cisco, likewise, has continue to expand it’s portfolio. - From both hardware and software for hybrid cloud solutions and analytics,
cloud service such as WebEx, and an ever growing portfolio of security services, networking, and professional services.
To learn more about Cisco’s offers, please take the time to see us the Marketplace, or attend the many sessions we are running through the rest of this week.
Yet challenges remain.
Cloud computing was supposed to make things simpler.
But for companies running in the cloud, the world has become fragmented, complex with little visibility into what’s going on
Customers are asking how to evolve from what they have, manage resources across environments, and develop new apps and services
We at Cisco have been focused on solving many of the these problems, specifically on making it easier to consume apps and services across clouds
This led to a partnership between Cisco and Google on a new hybrid cloud solution.
This brings together best of Cisco infrastructure, networking expertise with Google’s technology and cloud services
Google and Cisco both recognize that customers want to be able to develop in the Cloud and deploy anywhere.
Access information from anywhere – break down boundaries that prevent pubic and private clouds applications from working together.
They want a world that is secure, agile, and be able to bridge their existing investments while taking advantage of new capabilities
So, in the last couple of years, we’ve seen great strides being made in containers, orchestration and micro-services based architectures
Customer’s want to take advantage of this approach since it is far easier than traditional big monolithic apps.
Component services built by independent teams to do only one thing and do it well. Scaled independently, and updated frequently
Leverage other cloud-based services in AI/ML
Microservices however, raise new issues and complexity associated with distributed computing systems.
Most of these revolve around managing traffic, authentication, and other communication issues.
Things become even harder when apps span multiple clouds
A Microservices architecture strives to make things simpler by breaking up a system into a set of component services. However, once you include the communications needs between services things get complicated fast. Each service must deal with authentication, load balancing, traffic management, and monitoring.
A better approach would be to hand off many of these difficult communication issues to a another service,
a Secure Service Mesh,
where they can be solved once for all services making up the new application
So one thing that really excites me, is that Cisco is joining with Google, IBM, and Lyft on Istio – an open source service mesh for micro-services
Istio brings observability to the communication between services, provides authentication, load balancing, traffic splitting, and service routing and many more
And I would encourage you all to take a look at it’s capabilities at Istio.io.
Simple example. Once your service is up and running, you want to test out new feature with live traffic.
For the IT organization, Kubernetes and Istio service mesh, allow customers to achieve an easy to operate, consistent environment across their data centers and public cloud platforms.
Combining the best of Cisco’s and Googles technologies and services.
So, by combining Cisco’s Private Cloud Infrastructure, Networking, and Security services
with Google’s Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, and Istio,
customers can once again have a consistent environment for applications across both on-premise and cloud environments
Looking a little further, this approach truly opens up the power of combining cloud-based services across multiple data centers and providers.
An app in public cloud can safely access on premise data center information.
Apps running within a data can incorporate advanced AI and machine learning services in the public cloud.
We get the best of both worlds.
In fact, the greatest impact I believe will be on how we think about apps development
With OpenStack, k8s, and Istio, we can build and manage apps across clouds
Boundaries become blurred as development becomes closer to assembly of ready-made, highly-scalable services . This allows developers to draw upon the very best or most advanced capabilities in AI and Machine learning.
Move much closer to the everything as a service, multicloud world!