Hyperscalers have played an instrumental role in enhancing scalability and elasticity in the cloud.

Nevertheless, as hyperscalers continue to rapidly innovate on underlying capabilities, new gaps spring up. This is one of the challenges that supercloud seeks to address, according to Ramesh Prabagaran (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Prosimo Inc.

“I would say first layer of that supercloud really fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of adopting the hyperscaler technologies,” Prabagaran said. “Once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there’s a few holes start to show up. So first job of supercloud really is to plug those holes.”

Prabagaran spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at today’s Supercloud 2event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why supercloud is a game-changer when it comes to propelling hyperscaler capabilities. (* Disclosure below.)

Bridging the gap between enterprises and hyperscalers

By providing homogeneity and consistency, supercloud enables enterprises to adopt the underlying hyperscaler capabilities faster, according to Prabagaran. This helps fill the void between businesses and hyperscalers.

“So you have hyperscalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies,” he explained. “There is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, and one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities by the hyperscalers. So that to me is kind of the supercloud layer of sorts.”

Some of the key drivers of the supercloud concept entail industry growth and demand for new capabilities, according to Prabagaran, who said that this is triggering an inflection point.

“If you look at one cohort here, its adoption,” he said. “If I have an externally facing digital presence, for example, then I’m going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what. If you’re looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it’s a different set of care. So both are equally important problems to solve for.”

Since supercloud provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers, it should be regarded as a platform not an architecture, according to Prabagaran. This is because platforms have room for innovation.

“I’m going to side on kind of the platform side, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time,” he explained. “Once you’re in, there really isn’t a fork in the road. Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I’m thinking supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice.”

Securing supercloud at the network layer

Since security is no longer in oblivion at the network layer, supercloud borrows a leaf from this ideology. Therefore, networking security is at the heart of the supercloud, Prabagaran believes.

“We’ve been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top?” he asked. “And then we had an alternative viewpoint, which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it’s neither. It’s almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together.”

Being cloud-native everywhere is crucial because it enhances transparency, according to Prabagaran, who said that this propels a company’s information technology capabilities.

“The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations,” he pointed out. “So the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real.”

Since hybrid creates a kind of distributed computing paradigm, supercloud is a perfect fit based on the different operating models presented, according to Prabagaran. Furthermore, more choice becomes inevitable.

“If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you’ll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies,” he noted. “This notion that going cloud-native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in how do I operate my data center versus my cloud.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Supercloud2:

(* Disclosure: Prosimo Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Prosimo nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE