The Future of the Hybrid Cloud

By Matt Hogstrom, Distinguished Engineer

The concept of devices all over the planet being able to access data no matter where it resides is at the core of modern computing. That’s why organizations keep their critical information in multiple environments, including private clouds, on-premises, and on the public cloud. Given this reality, the key for businesses to get the most value from their technology investments lies in achieving the right balance. Broadcom advises business leaders on the hybrid cloud strategies that can best position them for success.

The best of all worlds

Business success in today’s competitive landscape depends upon the strength, efficiency, and agility of your IT. That’s why just about every company in the world relies on a strategy that integrates multiple platforms – software, hardware, and business applications delivered through cloud. That strategy is hybrid. It offers the best of all worlds with cloud included as a powerful element in the IT arsenal. The beauty of hybrid cloud lies in the principles of open, flexible compute. By integrating disparate platforms, it excels as a utility for driving business workloads in the best way. It allows organizations to leverage and extend current investments with the cloud model to gain new levels of reach and agility.

Winning in the cloud

Organizations have significant investments in apps and data. Hybrid cloud enables them to extend and innovate those investments while still capitalizing on the benefits of their current stacks. In effect, they fuse the agility, flexibility, and ease of the public cloud with the strength and capabilities of private cloud and traditional, on-premises IT.

A hybrid approach gives IT leaders greater opportunities to optimize their operations. For example, they can quickly and easily add more storage and compute power without having to re-architect their existing systems.

So, what does it take to deploy a successful hybrid cloud solution? It comes down to picking the unique capabilities that each platform offers so they can each contribute specific strengths and work in concert with one another.

IT leaders are now strategically architecting hybrid clouds inclusive of mainframes because the processors are so fast, and the architecture is so robust, that they can seamlessly manage data from multiple sources with near-zero latency. For workloads that are “chatty” and do a lot of I/O or require high throughput – or if you need a business-critical level of security – the mainframe brings unmatched strengths to a hybrid cloud environment.

Open is the way forward

Today, with an approach that fully leverages open APIs, command line interfaces, and other modern open-source technologies – what Broadcom calls an Open-First approach – it’s easier than ever to integrate and extend the mainframe as part of your hybrid cloud. In many cases, going Open-First can also offset the need to rewrite applications or duplicate data.

This “Open-First” approach offers freedom and choice for customers to modernize and deploy hybrid on their own terms and at the rate and pace they are most comfortable with. For example, mainframe application development can incorporate high-value DevOps practices such as code scanning, code reviews, and test automation.

Cloud programmers can develop applications for deployment on the mainframe just like they do on the cloud with a developer experience that is no different than the cloud-native environment they are already familiar with. And the Open-First path provides options that are non-disruptive bycombining new ways of working with established approaches such asBridge for Git and dynamic environments. For business leaders, embracing the flexibility of an Open-First approach is an easy decision. It enables them to maintain their existing workflows while introducing new ones.

Turns out you actually can have your cake and eat it too.

An à la carte approach to the cloud

Hybrid cloud is a game changer from an organizational and a development perspective. It effectively allows system architects to place services anywhere rather than forcing them to work just in a single environment. This creates the ability to disaggregate services and deliver better solutions than they could get in a single autonomous package. Think of it as an “a la carte” approach to building solutions.

A great example is mobile apps that require frequent updates/changes to UX to be competitive while the backend is mainframe. Once applications are developed and deployed, Broadcom enables simpler management. Every Broadcom product registers with a central catalog of services. If technology teams want to use a system view service to get information about CPU or a particular set of information on the mainframe, it’s just a REST API call away – and it can be run on a completely different system. In practical terms, this means you can access data instantly no matter where it resides, allowing companies to take full advantage of the speed and power of their mainframes.

Broadcom and the hybrid cloud

A compelling virtue of Broadcom’s Open-First approach is that, by combining new ways of working with established processes, it provides a non-disruptive path to innovation and value. Recent advances in cloud capabilities open up a new range of possibilities to make hybrid development teams more productive. Using the Open Container Initiative (OCI) model to build images and deploy them using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a clear example.

Other advances provide operations teams across the hybrid cloud with a better understanding of how they can leverage the mainframe for deploying applications and managing them in a consistent way. At the core of these cloud capabilities lies Broadcom’s expertise in infrastructure and storage – specialized skills and solutions that prioritize data in a way designed from their core to drive maximum efficiency. 

To learn more about how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize, and protect your enterprise, contact us here.

About the Author:

Matt Hogstrom is a Distinguished Engineer focusing on AIOPs –Automation. As a motivated technologist, he is passionate about embracing new technology and change to deliver innovative solutions. To that end, his role at Broadcom is to simplify automation of z/OS by enabling Broadcom Monitoring and Automation products to be easily consumable as RESTful services. Matt is based in Research Triangle Park, Durham, NC.