A hybrid cloud is basically an on-premise infrastructure integrated with one or more cloud services. Easy, right?
Here’s a quick summary told in an action-packed story by Joe.
Innovate Or Be Left Behind
Once upon a time – around 2005ish. There was a huge disruption.
It began with hoards of people jumping on the fast-moving VMware.com bandwagon and virtualizing server infrastructure (I was one of them).
First, we installed the GSX hypervisor on Windows to build VMs.
But GSX was quickly replaced with ESX (Linux Hosted).
And then ESX turned into ESXi and vSphere.
Virtualization was a great new technology that took the IT world by storm.
VMware vSphere became the coolest tech to learn.
For the moment, everyone was happy building virtual servers.
But then…
Out of nowhere – Amazon came along and disrupted things again with their AWS Elastic Cloud.
And so began the hybrid cloud that continues to this day.
AWS was quickly followed by Google’s Cloud Engine. Then Microsoft’s Azure Cloud showed up. And to make things fun and challenging, each flavor of cloud preferred a different scripting language. This meant more skills for people to learn: Terraform for AWS, Powershell for Azure, and Go for Google. And let’s not forget my favorite, Python.
Non-techies. Python is a fantastic general-purpose language used quite often for automation by Ops, but the uses are enormous.
As tech kept evolving, we just kept integrating which birthed the concept of DevOps and CI/CD.
Today, people with DevOps skills are in huge demand everywhere because they can write code in cloud languages.
Everyone building a hybrid cloud requires a lot of scripting for their integrations. But let’s keep going. Then a few years ago hybrid clouds added Docker Containers, Nutanix Converged Infrastructure, as well as all sorts of software-defined storage and networks to the mix. VMware was back at it with vSAN for virtual storage, and NSX for virtual networking. And if that’s not enough, recently we’re also seeing A.I., Machine Learning, and No Code/Low Code getting added. But a new disruption is coming.
Soon Quantum Computing will be the tech trend companies must have to keep up.
Gone are the simple days of building a single physical database, web, and application server to host each of your applications in your data center.
Nowadays it’s hard to keep track of all the VMs, containers, redundancies, fault tolerances, and cloud resources it takes. Add all the new technologies that are getting bundled together, and your head wants to explode. But it doesn’t because this is what we live for, right?
You need dedicated men and women to support this complex web of integrated on-prem and cloud services that I call, the hybrid cloud.
How does the hybrid cloud work?
Let’s be fair to all the brilliant people who do their unique part. Day after day. 24x7x365.
BTW. This brief summary of “what a hybrid cloud is” doesn’t include all the hardware, software, mobile, video, and security changes that have been happening too. Advancements in hybrid cloud technology are happening everywhere, all of the time.
It takes a lot of smart, talented, skilled people to make it all happen.
Now for the best part about this hybrid cloud story.
When you support a hybrid cloud there’s always something new to learn.
Really. You’re always learning. Being challenged. Growing. It’s been a blast training, learning, experiencing, building, and working with all this new technology. Figuring out how to make it work. And then continuously adding something new that breaks it so you have to figure out how to make it work again. Best of all. It’s great working with super smart people who have magical technical skills. Do you have magical skills?
You don’t want to be left on the sideline – bored – writing documentation.
No, way!
You want to be hands-on, right?
In the midst of the action, right?
Helping your team figure out the cool new stuff, right?
Listen.
Every hybrid cloud has its own story about unique people.
To be a part of the story, start immediately working on DevOps skills.
You should quickly learn how to script with any (or all) the coding languages noted above.
The sooner you learn to script, the better your opportunities.
Make learning to script #1 on your personal growth strategy.
Why scripting? Because scripting is your ticket in.
And don’t hesitate to use our free technical productivity guides to help you.
Can you see where this story is going?
Grrrr. The disruption continues. It’s like a monster movie, except there’s no end.
New network tech, add it. New storage tech, add it. New security tech, add it. New. New. New.
Do you get the picture? It just keeps going and going…
It’s time to join the Hybrid Journey!
- Introduction to Virtual Machines
- VMware vSphere Training for Beginners
- DevOps Training for Beginners
- How to Get Noticed in the Crowd
