AWS + EasyStack, Hybrid Cloud War Upgrade

BEIJING, Aug. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, at the AWS Summit 2017 in Beijing, hybrid cloud became the biggest highlight, with EasyStack officially unveiling the upgraded version of its hybrid cloud ESCloud Hybrid and teaming up with AWS and Intel to jointly demonstrate a hybrid cloud solution based on OpenStack private cloud + AWS public cloud at the exhibit area.

It was disclosed that the ESCloud Hybrid, a significantly upgraded version following EasyStack's initial launch of a hybrid cloud at the OpenStack Summit Paris 2014, can connect with not only such IaaS resource layers as computing, network and storage, but also application layers that support business operations, to achieve down-to-the-minute deployment and automated migration between private and public clouds, thus laying a solid technical foundation for the popularization of hybrid cloud.

The hybrid cloud upgrade war looms on the horizon

The hybrid cloud is not a new concept - as early as at the time of the emergence of private clouds and public clouds, some people had already predicated that hybrid cloud would become mainstream. But its momentum only ascends up in the second half of this year. The reason is that in terms of cloud computing, the pre-2016 era was mostly about public cloud adoption, while starting from 2017, the composition of migrating businesses to cloud has changed from internet companies and SMBs to large-and-medium-scale customers, whose traditional sectors adopted private clouds in large scale. Private clouds are regarded as a major channel for the businesses' strategic upgrade.

As the main users of hybrid clouds are the enterprises which have already setup private clouds, it is only when the private cloud has reached a critical scale that competition with hybrid clouds would emerge. IDC's data indicates that 73% corporate cloud users would adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. Because of cost optimization and security/compliance considerations, hybrid clouds have become increasingly popular among corporate users because they combine both the flexibility of public cloud and the security of private cloud.

In the second half of this year, both public cloud and private cloud players began to strengthen their presence in the hybrid cloud strategy. For example, Microsoft began to pre-sell Azure Stack, AWS announced a partnership with VMware to jointly launch a hybrid cloud solution, open source companies EasyStack and Red Hat also launched AWS-based hybrid cloud solutions. With hybrid clouds suddenly becoming the biggest highlight in the cloud computing segment this year after a few years of tepid development, a hybrid cloud upgrade war is now looming on the horizon.

Why did AWS and Intel choose EasyStack as their hybrid cloud demonstration partner at the AWS Summit? As early as at the end of 2014, EasyStack, who now had China's first hybrid cloud users, demonstrated its hybrid cloud solution targeting the IaaS resource layer at the OpenStack Summit Paris. With the private clouds of most industry users in China choosing the open source OpenStack architecture, and EasyStack boasting over 200 large-and-medium sized scale corporate customers in the OpenStack area, it's just natural for the three parties to set up the joint demonstration.

EasyStack hybrid cloud: integrate cloud resources and applications simultaneously

In general, a hybrid cloud user would use a public cloud as a secondary supplement to its private cloud to alleviate pressure on the latter while achieving elastic scaling of cloud resources and flexible expansion of businesses.

Liu Guohui, Co-Founder & CTO at EasyStack, said that the ESCloud Hybrid solution not only supports unified management and scheduling by the original basic version of public cloud and private cloud resource pools at the basic resource layer of IaaS, but also achieves flexible allocation at the business application layer through container technology. This means that ESCloud Hybrid can support business applications orchestration through a unified cluster platform across basic resource pools to avoid the complexity and differentiation of bottom layer resources.

With the launch of the Kubernetes-based container product ESCloud Container in March this year, EasyStack's hybrid cloud solution has been substantially upgraded, resulting in a new ESCloud Hybrid solution that achieves unified scheduling and management across public and private resource pools via a unified platform, while streamlining implementation, operation and maintenance to improve user experience via an unified operation interface even under multiple-cloud management scenarios, all from a business application user's perspective.

Simultaneously supporting multiple clouds, including multiple vendors and multiple resource pools, the OpenStack-based ESCloud Hybrid solution has successfully solved the reliability problem resulted from deploying business application on single public cloud. In addition, by integrating both the resource and application layers, it is more efficient than other hybrid clouds that only integrate a basic resource pool.

The hybrid cloud deployment cycle has shrunk from days to minutes by automating the resource deployment and configuration process, which required manual script writing in the past; while the original dynamic resource expansion was neither real-time nor economical as it required manual intervention. The Kubernetes, a cross-resource pool business support cluster platform, not only supports multiple-cloud mode but also achieves automated on-demand-use and pay-as-you-go mode of hybrid cloud, and implement consolidated management interface for unified allocation, deployment and billing among different resource pools.

Scenario-based hybrid cloud practice

EasyStack has already begun to serve the first hybrid cloud customers in China, supporting a range of scenario-based hybrid cloud applications.

In addition to their own OpenStack private clouds, many early customers of the EasyStack ESCloud Hybrid cloud also need to connect with an AWS resource pool for their overseas subsidiaries' businesses seamlessly.

Apart from adopting the EasyStack ESCloud to build its private cloud, the O2O platform of TCL, a leading high-tech manufacturer, also needs to seamlessly connect with an AWS public cloud for its online and offline sales, logistics and service networks in response to resource pool expansion at the periods of intense business load, with a view to meet the business's requirements on the controllability, security and reliability of its private cloud, while combining a public cloud's agility, low-cost and resiliency.

The sources also said that EasyStack is now cooperate with a leading automotive manufacturer to setup the hybrid cloud of OpenStack + public cloud. The cloud will integrate hundreds of automobile 4S stores all around China, to achieve unified management and extract valuable info from mass data of car parts, logistics and customers.

SOURCE EasyStack