Why Developers Need To Care About Distributed Cloud Computing
Customers expect technology to deliver what they want almost immediately, with minimal effort on their part, and they expect their data will be secure. Developers need to look beyond traditional cloud computing to deliver a new level of digital experience to retain their customers, enhance services and create new revenue streams.
Developers embraced cloud computing to solve the challenges they faced in rapidly creating, iterating and managing infrastructure and applications, and, in the process, things grew more and more complex. Cloud computing accelerated time to market, made scaling easier and was a path to move those infrastructure and application workloads from a centralized data center to customers wherever they were located. But along the way, developers lost control of costs and efficiencies by adding cloud services ad hoc, and the ballooning AWSbill meme was born.
Kubernetes threw fuel on the fire. The proliferation of microservices has resulted in sprawling hybrid architectures, and the volume of data generated to track it all is truly astonishing. It has been reported that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years.
Scaling doesn’t even seem like the appropriate verb to describe what is required of systems right now. We need an entirely new approach. Fortunately for developers, the cloud native principles they’ve learned and embraced can be applied in the next evolution of cloud: distributed cloud computing.
Cloud Computing Grows Up, or Rather, Out
Distributed cloud computing is taking public cloud services and distributing them to where data is created and captured. Stepping away from the centralized model of traditional cloud computing gives developers the flexibility to choose the right cloud for their localization needs. The location-centric nature of distributed cloud is one of the most important features of this modern approach to cloud computing and directly addresses the demands of customers for customized services that handle their personal data responsibly and securely. Distributed cloud providers offer highly distributed infrastructure that brings processing power closer to end users and developers.
When customers agree to share their data with a company, they expect to be served a personalized experience with minimal clicks or delay. Gathering and processing their data via distributed cloud enables that real-time experience no matter where they are on the globe. It also offers enhanced security and compliance that isn’t available through a single centralized, monolithic public cloud. Compliance regulations that require data to remain in the same geographical area in which it was generated are addressed by distributed cloud. Cost and latency are also optimized when data doesn’t have to travel out to a centralized data center and back again to deliver the personalized experience customers expect.
Rather than scaling up public cloud services to meet demand from a centralized location, distributed cloud scales out to where customers are.
Rest assured, developers who are embracing distributed cloud need not worry about losing the benefits that brought them to cloud computing in the first place. The use of APIs among services as well as composability and portability are still features of distributed cloud computing. Developers get to choose the right cloud for the virtual machines or the container environments that they are accustomed to using. Orchestration, monitoring and observability will differ among cloud providers, but the application itself remains fully portable.
The fastest-growing companies in any segment gain 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing competitors. Data is generated where the customer is, and it grows and changes there as well. Distributed cloud offers an open, portable platform that gives companies the opportunity to think strategically about their overall cloud strategy with cost optimization, enhanced security compliance and optimal customer satisfaction in mind.
