The adoption of cloud-based technologies by businesses has skyrocketed due to the pandemic and rapid digital transformation. In fact, by 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. It also said that in 2022, global cloud revenue is estimated to reach $474 billion, from $408 billion in 2021.
Realising this potential, Google has come out with a new concept, calling it “software-defined community cloud” that is designed to deliver the benefits of a community cloud in a more modern architecture.
Assured Workloads
In a post, Google said that software-defined community clouds are implemented using a combination of technologies referred to in aggregate as “Assured Workloads.” With this integration, Google Cloud can define communities around shared mission, security and compliance requirements, policy, and add or remove capabilities from a community’s boundary with policy-controlled and audited configuration changes.
In terms of benefits, Google says software-defined community clouds come with a variety of advantages.
- When compared to traditional community clouds, the new services and improvements to existing services can be made available faster. New technology can be made available faster through faster onboarding channels.
- Efficiency increases in this type of model due to the scale of infrastructure available to the community. It can lead to better availability and performance.
Different types of clouds
- Public cloud – These are usually managed by third parties and are accessible to the public through an internet connection. It serves multiple users, is low cost, scalable and can be easily set up. Some common examples of public clouds are AWS Direct Connect, Blue Cloud by IBM, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc.
- Private cloud – It is offered exclusively to one organisation and comes with a high level of security and privacy to data. It provides more control and enhanced performance but can have high costs and limited scalability options. Some examples of private cloud are IBM Cloud Private, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, etc.
- Hybrid cloud – As the name suggests, it is a mix of the features of a private and a public cloud. It comes with better flexibility, agility, scalability, among others.
- Community cloud – Here, different organisations share the resources and services, keeping in mind certain regulatory requirements. They bring in more openness, scalability, flexibility, convenience and control.
How is it different from traditional community cloud
Google brings out a few areas in which a software-defined community cloud stands out compared to a traditional cloud.
New type of “Government Cloud”
In the post, Google says, “In Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a project is an isolated, logical grouping of “infrastructure primitives.” An infrastructure primitive could be a virtual machine, a persistent disk, a storage bucket, etc. These primitives that are assigned to that project are scoped to only that project, creating an “enclave” per project.
