Edge computing considerations
You often see edge computing incorrectly described as an alternative to cloud computing. Edge computing is about moving compute to local devices in a highly distributed system, typically as a layer around a cloud computing core. There is typically a cloud involved to orchestrate all of the devices and take in their data, then analyze it or otherwise act on it.
To the cloud and back – why repatriation is real
While public cloud offers scalability and flexibility, some enterprises are opting to return to on-premises infrastructure due to rising costs, data security concerns, performance issues, vendor lock-in, and regulatory compliance challenges. While the public cloud offers scalability and flexibility, on-premises infrastructure provides greater control, customization, and potential cost savings in certain scenarios leading some technology decision-makers to consider repatriation. However, a hybrid cloud approach, combining public and private cloud, often offers the best balance of benefits.
More specific reasons to repatriate including the following:
- Unanticipated costs, such as data transfer fees, storage charges, and egress fees, can quickly escalate, especially for large-scale cloud deployments.
- Inaccurate resource provisioning or underutilization can lead to higher-than-expected costs.
- Stricter data privacy regulations require organizations to store and process data within specific geographic boundaries.
- For highly sensitive data, companies may prefer to maintain greater control over security measures and access permissions.
- On-premises infrastructure can offer lower latency, particularly for applications requiring real-time processing or high-performance computing.
- Overreliance on a single cloud provider can limit flexibility and increase costs. Repatriation allows organizations to diversify their infrastructure and reduce vendor dependency.
- Industries with stringent compliance requirements may find it easier to meet standards with on-premises infrastructure.
- On-premises environments offer greater control over hardware, software, and network configurations, allowing for customized solutions.
Benefits of cloud computing
The cloud’s main appeal is to reduce the time to market of applications that need to scale dynamically. Increasingly, however, developers are drawn to the cloud by the abundance of advanced new services that can be incorporated into applications, from machine learning to internet of things (IoT) connectivity.
Although businesses sometimes migrate legacy applications to the cloud to reduce data center resource requirements, the real benefits accrue to new applications that take advantage of cloud services and “cloud native” attributes. The latter include microservices architecture, Linux containers to enhance application portability, and container management solutions such as Kubernetes that orchestrate container-based services. Cloud-native approaches and solutions can be part of either public or private clouds and help enable highly efficient devops workflows.
Cloud computing, be it public or private or hybrid or multicloud, has become the platform of choice for large applications, particularly customer-facing ones that need to change frequently or scale dynamically. More significantly, the major public clouds now lead the way in enterprise technology development, debuting new advances before they appear anywhere else. Workload by workload, enterprises are opting for the cloud, where an endless parade of exciting new technologies invite innovative use.
SaaS has its roots in the ASP (application service provider) trend of the early 2000s, when providers would run applications for business customers in the provider’s data center, with dedicated instances for each customer. The ASP model was a spectacular failure because it quickly became impossible for providers to maintain so many separate instances, particularly as customers demanded customizations and updates.
Salesforce is widely considered the first company to launch a highly successful SaaS application using multitenancy — a defining characteristic of the SaaS model. Rather than each Salesforce customer getting its own application instance, customers who subscribe to the company’s salesforce automation software share a single, large, dynamically scaled instance of an application (like tenants sharing an apartment building), while storing their data in separate, secure repositories on the SaaS provider’s servers. Fixes can be rolled out behind the scenes with zero downtime and customers can receive UX or functionality improvements as they become available.
