Go to LHC1809bu at VMworld to find out! I have been asking people this question for a while. Most say it is when they use multiple clouds. Not a fan of that response.
if I'm a bit less cynical, I see it was companies living in multiple IaaS or PaaS environments, doing so intentionally, and thinking about how to move workloads back and forth. SaaS sits outside of that.
@fdmts this is my pet peeve bc many just think multi-cloud is apps on one cloud and others on another. Not really multicloud in my mind. Latency is huge issue
@fdmts It's a "nice to demo" feature but even if you do live costing the portability is too hard to be worth it often due to the weight moving data. It almost cries out for a cloud data management layer. ;)
Hybrid cloud will be the way of the future once you get common data and network planes working across multiple clouds. It will allow for much better decision making and curation of cloud.
There is a spectrum implied in multi-cloud - to some its JBOC (just a bunch of clouds) to others it's federated hybrid cloud with application logic spanning clouds
@patrickrogersca Lock yourself into a single cloud provider and get on with solving business use cases. Not worth the time to optimize between the major public providers.
@fdmts Actually, I don't know if the multi cloud application here is really arbitrage but rather using other clouds like Azure when you want to integrate with Active Directory or Google when you want to use some special capabilities (AI / ML) primitives.
As a macro trend, data analytics / Machine Learning / AI / Deep learning / whatever you want to call it ... it's here and it demands massive scaling of data coupled with CPU capacity.
There's also a whole set of scale-out technologies pioneered at FaceBook/Google/etc. that are now looking for for problems to solve + monetize in the mid-market and enterprise.
@steve_pao Agreed... Businesses are generating a ton of new data and are afraid to delete any of the old. All are looking to a world where they might get answers from big data one day.
the need to independently scale resources will always be there, any time you purchase resources that aren't absolutely required you're missing an opportunity for cost optimization
One driver is the flexibility that comes with knowing you can grow as needed with little or no disruption. You don't have to size it correctly the first time.
Another driver is the amount of data being stored. Legacy architecture is not capable of storing this much data in a useful way. Users want to do more than pump and dump data into some repository.
A lot - I'd argue hyperconvergence is possible due to scale-out tech. So is containers/Docker/Kubernetes. Obviously what I do at my day job is made possible there too.
I think that most scale out systems are "clustered" in one sense of the word. The distinction lies in scale out's ability to expand capacity in a balanced way without introducing bottlenecks.
clustering often refers to a dual node system, though not always, in a sense, most traditional scale up storage architecture are actually 2 clustered controllers
historically clustering was about resiliency and removing single points of failure. Let's go back to Novell Cluster Services for instance. Scale-out is focused at very different thigns.
some companies have sought to merge those though - aka NetApp with scaling out dual controller clusters for their Data Fabric. I'd argue that's not scale-out per se.
Clustering is a tech that can potentially be used for scaling out but it depends on the architecture. For example a master/slave architecture cannot scale out in the same way as a shared-nothing architecture.
Often, clustering can be used for scale-out, but also clustering might restrict scale-out to achieve redundancy. So, the terms are somewhat orthogonal.
@fdmts I think of a cluster as a logical collection of resources performing the same task...versus a set of discreet resources allocated to different things
@andriven and @fdmts, agree with both, think one fundamental difference between cluster and scale out is that clusters can have passive resources, scale out generally has all active resources
@dinisco Good distinction - in scale-out often all resources can be used and during failure scenarios the total resources available diminishes rather than inherent performance decrease.