Making the Case for Smarter Hybrid Cloud Computing

In a world where cloud computing has already become a commodity, solution providers need to find a way to add value. Given the abundance of capital, there is no shortage of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) options. For solution providers to succeed in the age of the cloud they need to find a way to add value above the infrastructure level.

With that issue in mind Joyent this week announced that it is making the SmartDataCenter software the power its public cloud service available for deployment on private cloud. Faced with many of the same issues that plague solution providers, Joyent developed SmartDataCenter to differentiate its services from all the IaaS offerings in the market, said company CTO Bryan Cantrill.

As a derivative of OpenSolaris, SmartDataCenter 7 makes use of containers as an alternative to hypervisors to provide a more efficient cloud computing environment. The basic issue with most IaaS environment, Cantrill said, is they are not truly elastic; rather, customers have to provision a finite amount of resources because cloud service providers require them to pay for a specific amount of infrastructure. Most of the time customers never really fully use the infrastructure, so they wind up overprovisioning their cloud environment.

Joyent circumvents this issue by making use of containers that Cantrill said allow IT infrastructure resources to be more granularly controlled. Containers split operating systems into two components. The lower level manages traditional operating system functions such as systems resources, while the upper level provides a portable set of run-time engines where application images are managed. As a result, there is no need to overprovision the cloud computing environment, he said. Just as importantly, containers allow cloud service providers to maximize hardware investments in a way that enables them to cost-effectively compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Containers not only provide better performance than a hypervisor, but the overall environment is more secure and resilient because each application workload has access to dedicated hardware resources for the length of time it runs, Cantrill said. Usage of containers, he added, should expand with the standardization of the technology that is being enabled by the Docker project.

Obviously, Joyent, which this week also named a new CEO to drive this strategy, is betting that the ability to have more granular control over hybrid cloud computing environments is going to appeal to IT organizations looking for cloud computing platforms that provide a more seamless application experience.

Naturally, more vendors view OpenStack as a way to accomplish much the same thing. But given the relative immaturity of OpenStack it may be a while before cloud service providers that support OpenStack can actually deliver equivalent functionality. In the meantime, Joyent is betting that, as open source software, it can gain enough traction solving real-world hybrid cloud computing today vs. the theoretical ones that OpenStack purports to solve tomorrow.