A few years ago I pointed out that multicloud really isn’t about the public clouds it’s built on. What I haven’t done is try to name it in an attempt to claim myself as a coiner of a new buzzword.
Not that I won’t pat myself on the back in all my narcissistic glory. Indeed, I created buzzwords that turned out to be billion dollar industries. But I also know that when you give something a name, it allows others to define it, which diminishes its usefulness. You end up defining a concept before it has a chance to evolve with use. Of course, architectural patterns like the one emerging above multicloud are something you don’t want to limit just yet.
Cloud watchers see the emergence of a technology layer that sits above the collection of public clouds; that’s what multicloud really becomes. This layer of application development, operations, observability, security, management, and more exists on top of public cloud providers that are bundled together to make a “multicloud.”
Terms that are beginning to appear, such as “supercloud,” “distributed cloud”, “metacloud” (my voice) and “abstract cloud”. Even the term “cloud born” is up for debate. To be fair to the creators of buzzwords, they all define the term a little differently, and I know the anger of defining a buzzword a little differently than others. The overall model seems to be a collection of public clouds and sometimes edge-based systems that work together for some larger purpose.
The metacloud concept will be the sole focus for the next 5 to 10 years as we begin to roll out public clouds. Having a collection of cloud services managed with abstraction and automation is far more valuable than trying to use every public cloud provider on its terms, not yours.
We want to use public cloud providers through abstract interfaces to access specific services, such as storage, compute, AI, data, etc., and we want to maintain a layer of cloud technology that allows us to use these services more efficiently . Metacloud removes the complexity that multicloud brings these days. Additionally, scaling operations to support multi-cloud services would not be cost-effective without this inter-cloud technology layer.
That way, we’ll have a single layer of security, management, operations, and even application development and deployment. This is what multicloud really needs to become. If we try to build more silos using proprietary tools that only work within one cloud, we’re going to need a lot of them. We’re just building more complexity that will ultimately make multicloud more of a liability than an asset.
I really don’t care what we call it, and I really don’t care if I throw my own buzzword into the mix. However, that doesn’t change the fact that metacloud is probably the most important architectural evolution happening right now, and we need to get it right out of the gate. If we do that, who cares what it’s called.
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