*Well, the "cloud" is other people's computers, but these fine distinctions of jargon have always been a big deal on the ol' blog here.
*"The Cloud As Platform" has been a particular favorite just for its oxymoronic self-contradiction.
Hey why don't we pile that Microsoft thing on top of that Amazon thing
Back in April, I wrote about how multicloud may soon become mix and match cloud. While at the time we were seeing the groundwork being laid, the concept has taken off in a stronger way over the past eight months.
As a refresher, when I say “mix and match cloud,” I’m talking about services from one cloud provider being offered on top of a competing cloud provider, enabling organizations to use services from different providers in different ways together. For instance, an organization could use the compute and storage capabilities holding the data in one cloud, with another cloud provider’s service running on top of (or with) that application and/or data. Thus the customer would have a relationship with Azure, for example, to store their data that is generated from a variety of applications that are running in Azure or both on-premise and in Azure; and they can run an AWS service to do data analysis on that data.
In addition to the multicloud element, we have seen more activity with public cloud provider offerings and strategies to address on-premise, or private-cloud environments. Google Anthos, AWS Outposts, and Microsoft AzureStack and Azure Arc most recently, are all efforts to provide capabilities that can run on-premise or in non-public cloud environments to complement the public cloud services. The moves to support on-premise are driven by what organizations are willing to, and capable of, doing in the public cloud and what they are not capable or willing to do there....
