As new enterprise cloud paradigms bloom into maturity, there has always been discussion within the information technology and developer communities about the components that could make it sink or swim.

Supercloud is a new idea, and thought leaders recently got together to discuss those factors.

“They’d try things out, they’d go to the cloud, they’d spin things up; and then the next team would come and they’d do the same things and there was no consistency,” said Haseeb Budhani (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Rafay Systems Inc. “There was no standardization. It’s a mess, and it’s all over the place. Some things are moving fast and others are not going fast, and this is not how enterprises [should] do business.”

Budhani alongside Kit Colbert (right), chief technology officer of VMware Inc., and Bhaskar Gorti (center), chief executive officer of Platform9 Systems Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analysts  John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Supercloud 22, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the things companies could do to harness supercloud.

Modern applications, modern infrastructure

It’s a tad disheartening to hear the word “modern” mentioned as an area of improvement, with the vast technological progress the enterprise industry has made. In this context, however, modernization points to streamlined uniformity.

“It’s about modern applications, modern infrastructure,” Budhani explained. “So, stepping back and thinking about it as to how an enterprise will do this across the board is the right answer. And I’m seeing this happen in a pretty significant way across all the large enterprises I talked to.”

While Kubernetes and other cloud-native tools are strong enablers, several aspects of how enterprise dev teams deploy today, across multiple simultaneous channels, are blockers, according to Gorti.

“You can’t stop developers from developing on different clouds: private, public, multi, edge. That’s going to happen,” he said. “Innovation is going to continue. But then how does the infrastructure in the platform make it seamless and almost treat all these different clouds as a single pain Supercloud platform? That, I think, is the opportunity.”

Within the discussion of platforms, the standardization of application programming interfaces and continuous, always-on monitoring are key, Gorti added.

“Once you build it, then as the enterprises are using it, the always-on monitoring becomes effective,” he said. “So I think it’s a combination of capabilities that are stitched together to enable the acceleration for companies to become cloud-native.”

On the topic of frameworks, organizations must question themselves as they choose to go directly cloud-native or through multicloud services, according to Colbert.

“So then the question is, what degrees of freedom do you give yourself there?” he said. “And I think that’s the architectural question: How do you design it? What sort of abstractions do you leverage? And I think that goes back to our discussion before, which is, do you directly go on top of a native cloud service or do you use a multicloud service?”

The role of hyperscalers

Hyperscalers always make it to the forefront of every cloud discussion because, to a large degree, they drive the spending, innovation and user preferences, according to Budhani. Thus, while some think the hyperscaler the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Snowflake Inc. could hamper supercloud for bottom-line reasons, others think they’re just what it needs to flourish.

In the latter camp, what looks to be playing out is companies tilting toward becoming managed service providers, according to Budhani.

“Cloud is a manifestation of that,” he said. “Snowflake is a manifestation of that. Databricks is a manifestation of that. So in our general industry, there’s going to be a handful of platforms and they’re going to work across these clouds. Amazon may have one too.”

As supercloud takes hold, there’s also going to be some form of fragmentation in places like virtualization technologies, where companies begin to create their own V-center for Kubernetes, according to Gorti.

“There was a distinct advantage VMware had back in the day, because ESX was their product and that was the standard,” Budhani said. “Right now, what’s the ESX in the new world? It’s sort of Kubernetes — I mean, on bare metal for the most part or VMs. So that’s a standard, that’s got standardized APIs. The things around it are standardized APIs. So what is the unfair advantage that any one company has, other than execution? Nothing.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Supercloud 22 event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE