How the hybrid cloud can create the world's computer
Channel: IBM Research
Date: 10/06/2021

For all the progress happening on cloud, we have to get to the point where we get the cloud to work as if it was a single infinitely powerful computer. 

Think about the simplicity of just working on your laptop. You have a common operating system, tools you're familiar with, and most importantly, you're spending most of your time working on code. Developing on the cloud is far from that. You have to understand the nuances of all the cloud providers. There's AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, private clouds. You have to provision cloud resources that might take a while to get online, and you have to worry about things like security and compliance, and resiliency, scalability, cost efficiency. That's a lot of complexity.

Hybrid cloud is no different. We now need a distributed operating system, to provide us that common layer of abstraction across these heterogeneous and distributed cloud resources. And Kubernetes is the open technology that's emerging as the winner in this evolutionary battle. So you have Linux containers, Kubernetes... And when it comes to enterprise-ready, supported, the most secure versions of this software, you have Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, and OpenShift. This is our hybrid cloud platform, and this is the foundation for our cloud computer.

Serverless technologies are the key to realizing this vision of the cloud as a computer. There are three key attributes to serverless. The first one is ease of use, on-demand elasticity, and pay for what you use. 

Here's an example. Take a simple data prep task on the cloud, which is fairly common, but the data in this case could be coming from anywhere. Edge environments, for example. And to make this as simple as a command you could issue on your laptop, a lot of things have to happen under the covers. And today, it's the developers and the data scientists doing these things manually. So I have to worry about, do I have access? Am I allowed to move the data? Where are the API keys? How many containers should I spin up? 

But with serverless, you can literally boil this down to one single command, as simple as moving files around on your laptop, and the serverless platform does the rest underneath. And we are pushing this vision forward today in the Knative open source community. Just like with Linux and Kubernetes, there is a supported enterprise-ready version of Knative that's available on OpenShift today called OpenShift Serverless. It's also available on IBM Cloud, called Code Engine. You can try these out today, and as we continue to push the application of serverless, it's getting us closer and closer to that vision of the cloud as a computer.