How many clouds do we need? Or to give the question more color and context, why are technology vendors so keen to tune, remix and label specific types of cloud as something different from all the other ‘instances’ of this form of datacenter-based services-centric computing?
Mostly, the reasoning here comes down to the fact that although all cloud services sit somewhere on a server ‘blade’, their form and composition can differ quite markedly depending upon how they are configured, optimized and integrated. We can build memory-tuned cloud services, storage-optimized cloud services, clouds built for high-throughput transactional Input/Output behavior or clouds tuned for down and dirty performance that we refer to as ‘compute’ optimized.
We can also form clouds that span different vendor platforms.
Tech industry bastions IBM & SAP are now teaming up to produce a new private edition of the SAP Cloud Platform running on the IBM Cloud as a dedicated cloud deployment. The SAP Cloud Platform, private edition, runs SAP's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) including the in-memory SAP HANA database on single-tenant servers, in IBM datacenters.
Highly-regulated industries
The companies say that this latest news represents another dinner date in what is a 46-year history of partnerships. The new collaboration is specifically designed for highly-regulated industries (such as banking, healthcare and transportation) to modernize and build new business applications on the cloud without jeopardizing security and control.
Senior VP of hybrid cloud and director of IBM Research Arvind Krishna argues that there’s just no one-size-fits-all approach in cloud. Companies have a broad spectrum of needs and want the flexibility to run their workloads across any platform - without having to rewrite everything as they go.
According to SAP, the SAP Cloud Platform provides business services, IoT services, machine learning, in-memory data management and big data services.
“SAP Cloud Platform, private edition, running on IBM Cloud is expected to provide flexibility for processing different data flows: from structured to unstructured data running in popular databases like MongoDB or Redis, to data residing within SAP HANA. Via this platform, practically any data can be connected to SAP applications using the exposed white listed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) native to the service,” said Bradley Knapp, offering manager, IBM Cloud.
Sensitive data
Knapp has explained that IBM is targeting clients that maintain highly-regulated data on things like financial records, health records and other personal data that have additional restrictions at the regional and country level regarding data residency and processing.
He says that clients of this new service partnership can ensure that they follow all relevant laws and regulations for the data they store, enabling both legal compliances as well as comfort that they, as the data stewards, are in full control of their regulated data.
“SAP Cloud Platform, private edition, will support all the Software Development Kits (SDKs) supported by the Cloud Foundry community. Specifically, Java, JavaScript and Node.js. It’s also important to note that HTML5 is all commonly used, but as the product runs on Cloud Foundry, the community buildpacks are all valid ways to program and interact with SAP Cloud Platform, Private Edition. Commonly, many developers will use the SAP Web IDE, which can provide some structure frameworks for SAP HANA XS Advanced (XSA), however any code editor could be used to write the applications,” said Thorsten Leiduck, global VP of platform ecosystem & echannels, SAP.
Nobody said blockchain, yet
This agreement falls under what the companies call the IBM/SAP Digital Transformation partnership -- and you thought nobody was going to say ‘digital transformation’ today did you? The agreement also serves to help develop private cloud deployments that tap new technologies like blockchain -- and you thought nobody was going to say blockchain today did you?
If any one theme comes out of development like this it is the work technology vendors are doing to attempt to help customers actually control their data and ultimately to monetize it. Question: how many more clouds do we actually need? Answer: probably quite a few given the still-nascent state of cloud computing overall, the still-changing nature of data regulation around the world (Europe especially this year) and the still-developing level of understanding that real-world companies have in terms of what they can and can’t do efficiently, securely and productively inside clouds.
