Distributed Cloud: The Future of Cloud Computing

The use of cloud environments for safe and effective data management and deploying business-specific applications is no longer a new approach. Still, distributed cloud attracts interest from companies that are eager to manage their data more intelligently, making data transfer as instant, safe, and seamless as possible.

What is Distributed Cloud?

The concept of “distributed cloud” refers to an innovative approach to defining cloud computing. According to it, a distributed cloud is a public cloud architecture that uses a distributed approach to data storage and processing. Simply said, a company that uses scattered cloud computing may store and analyze its data in many data centers located in different areas.

With this targeted, coordinated distribution of public cloud services, your business may deploy and run applications or particular application components in a mix of cloud locations and environments that best meet your performance, regulatory compliance, and other requirements. It avoids operational and administrative inconsistencies that may arise in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

A distributed cloud service is essentially a public cloud that operates in several locations, such as:

• The infrastructure of a public cloud provider
• End-user locations in the data center or at the edge are considered on-premises.
• In a different cloud provider’s data center
• Using third-party hardware or a colocation facility

How does it work?

You may have heard of distributed computing, in which application components are spread across different networked computers, and communicate with one another through messaging or APIs, to improve overall application performance or maximize computing efficiency.

Distributed cloud goes a giant step further by distributing a public cloud provider’s entire compute stack to wherever a customer might need it – on-premises in the customer’s own data center or private cloud, or off-premises in one or more public cloud data centers that may or may not belong to the cloud provider.

In effect, it extends the provider’s centralized cloud with geographically distributed micro-cloud satellites. The cloud provider retains central control over the operations, updates, governance, security, and reliability of all distributed infrastructure. And the customer accesses everything – the centralized cloud services, and the satellites wherever they are located – as a single cloud and manages it all from a single control plane.

What are the benefits?

• Increased compliance. Distributed by nature, workloads, and data can be located where they must be to meet regulatory demands.
• Increased uptime. Since cloud services can reside on local subnets they can be isolated – even untethered from the main cloud – when needed to ensure they are isolated from a crashed system to provide redundancy.
• Scalability. Adding VMs or nodes as needed not only enables rapid scalability but also improves the overall availability of the cloud system as a whole.
• Flexibility. It simplifies the installation, deployment, and debugging of new services.
• Faster processing. Distributed systems can be faster by leveraging compute of multiple systems for a given task. Also, the distributed cloud enables more responsive communications for specific regions.
• Performance. Unlike centralized computer network clusters, it can provide higher performance and better cost performance.

Potential use cases

Because this is a fairly new approach to cloud computing and hasn’t been widely adopted yet, not all of its potential applications have been realized. However, some are readily apparent:

• Edge computing: The ability to operate effectively at the edge is becoming increasingly essential to any enterprise that must process real-time data at high volumes – i.e., most enterprise-scale organizations. The distributed cloud can help optimize these edge computing operations.
• Internet of Things (IoT): Sensors and other technologies within IoT frameworks are essentially edge devices, making the distributed cloud ideal for harnessing the massive quantities of data such devices generate.
• Artificial intelligence (AI): AI and machine learning (ML) applications ranging from medical device management to manufacturing automation are driven by real-time data, which can travel as fast as it needs to with distributed cloud’s low latency.
• Content delivery: Distributed cloud computing frameworks are ideal content delivery networks (CDNs) for streaming video and other dynamic web-based applications because the content is stored and delivered from locations closer to end users.

What is the future of Distributed Cloud?

The transition to a distributed cloud is becoming one of the most important trends. But in the future, the technology will be actively developed, as analysts say. At least for now, cloud providers are busy installing and equipping substations that they will use for edge computing. According to experts’ forecasts, by 2025, cloud services will dominate among other information and communication technologies, and at the same time, the popularity of distributed clouds will grow proportionally.

Conclusion

The usage of distributed cloud can promote better efficiency for data management and transfer. Edge computing, in turn, is the logical response to distributed cloud adoption and increased amount of data generation. It is ideal for businesses that need to process data in real-time and make instant decisions, for example, with the help of decision intelligence.

Infopulse experts can support you along the way to distributed cloud adoption, develop an intelligent cloud data migration strategy and power your IT ecosystem with additional technologies that will help you unlock even more business benefits.