Ushering in a new age of distributed cloud

5G and the distributed cloud will shape a new age in technology. There is a very real near-term economic incentive to evolve to a 5G network, but in order for telco providers to deliver additional value to their customers and attract new categories of customers, there is a key component to success – they must be able to harness the power of distributed cloud computing. As it is deployed in 5G vRAN and other applications, it will be the technology that enables activities that have yet to be imagined.

The distributed cloud market size is projected to reach USD 5.0 billion by 2026, from USD 1.3 billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of 26.4 percent during 2021–2026. Key players include Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Massive-grid, Alibaba Cloud, Liquid Web, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware, Oracle Cloud, VeriZon Cloud, and IBM Cloud.

The distributed cloud consists of three layers. The central cloud is the main layer that is responsible for data management and provision. It covers the entire works of the cloud. Among the most popular core clouds should be highlighted Google, AWS, and many others. The regional cloud is considered to be the middle layer and provides a high level of local mobility, data caching, and proxy, for example, CDN, and PMIPv6. The edge cloud is the last layer and is located in the users’ proximity. Edge cloud provides real-time services on mobile devices where data is processed close to its source, for example, MEC, FC, etc.

By 2024, Gartner predicts most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need. Distributed cloud exists on a continuum and can include on-premises public cloud, metro-area community cloud, 5G mobile edge cloud, IoT edge cloud, or network edge cloud. “The vision behind distributed cloud, I’m not going to say is limitless, but there are a lot of different places it can take us,” said David Smith, VP and fellow at Gartner at a recently held conference. “We’re going to get to a situation where you would be able to go to a cloud provider and just ask for meeting certain kinds of requirements, rather than detailed configuration, such as compliance requirements, budget and interest in emerging tech,” according to Smith.

Future applications are additionally moving toward mobile use, IoT, and AR/VR. All would require distributed computing services for a great customer experience. Customer experience is one of the crucial variables in the coming years with regards to estimating the success of an IT solution.

Two distinct and separate phenomena led to the birth of the distributed cloud. As the edge increasingly cloudified and true multi-cloud gained momentum, they contributed to a larger evolution toward the distributed cloud. The distributed cloud is an all-new approach that enables organizations to manage all disparate components – edge apps, apps stretched across multiple clouds, legacy datacenter apps, and the infrastructure that supports them all – as one logical cloud. This means being able to manage, operate, and secure all these compute areas as a single, distributed cloud. That means deploying apps with a common set of policies and overarching visibility across all locations and heterogenous infrastructure.

Cloud services from public cloud suppliers become distributed out to explicit and different physical locations – operations being genuinely nearer to the individuals who need the capacities to empower low-latency compute. This likewise guarantees a reliable control plane to manage the cloud infrastructure from public to private cloud and expand reliably across the two environments. Taken together, these things can provide significant upgrades in performance because of the end of latency issues, as well as reduce the risk of worldwide network-related outages or control plane shortcomings.

Distributed cloud computing makes strategically positioned substations of cloud compute, networking, and storage that can go about as shared cloud pseudo-availability zones.

Low-latency applications and regulatory compliance are possible issues for conventional centralized infrastructure. Distributed systems in cloud computing mitigate those downsides by properly distributing the workload to pre-relegated – which is generally the server actually closest to clients. Soon, data network utilization will incorporate augmented reality, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT). They are generally low-latency applications, and will essentially profit from the CDN/caching function of the distributed cloud.

By keeping certain computational, data delivery, and storage local, distributed cloud computing speeds up latency to users who need it and lessens resource requirements to every other person and the central infrastructure overall. It makes the whole solution more proficient for all users.

With cloud computing distributed systems, distributed cloud benefits include being open for purchase – users can ask that specific information stays inside explicit regions, or that a specific performance target for latency or throughput is met. These are communicated in service level agreements (SLAs) between the client and the cloud supplier.

It is the work of the cloud supplier to conceal the intricacies of how such SLAs are met. This may consist of working out extra cloud infrastructure for explicit areas, or partnering with cloud suppliers effectively who are already present in those regions. Moreover, high-speed data interconnections should be set up between these geologically scattered data centers.

Significant cloud service providers have their own technology to incorporate into these scattered cloud data centers to guarantee the intelligent placement of data, storage, and computing to meet the SLAs, all clear to the cloud users.

The control that companies can wield over their systems can offer unparalleled customization and tailoring of resources to business needs.

Even though a hybrid cloud requires a shared infrastructure, management is resource-intensive. The enterprise needs to control both environments, and this requires hiring more specialized employees and, accordingly, spending more money. A distributed cloud can significantly reduce the financial burden, albeit the upfront costs for distributed clouds may be high.

One key challenge is complexity. Distributed cloud computing is rather complicated to implement and maintain. It is a difficult task to reveal all bugs and fix them. A distributed cloud also needs a high level of security and a feature of constant communication that is complex. The amounts of processed data are vast and need different levels of access. A user who has access to specific information should have full control of this information to share, change, or delete it in case of need.

COVID-19 has been a propellant for a global economic crisis, but it has also accelerated an expanding digital economy. As the impact of the global pandemic continues to change the nature of work, distributed cloud technologies are now set to reshape the post-COVID world. Even prior to the pandemic, cloud technologies had become one of the main capital investments for most organizations. The distributed cloud services add an additional geographical layer, moving compute and data closer to users.

While distributed cloud has been a buzzword for some time, its value is now becoming indisputable. Distributed cloud, with a cloud-agnostic approach, is the right architecture for a world in which smart devices are in everything and exist everywhere. Drawing meaningful conclusions and outcomes from these devices and the data they collect and generate will now be possible with the distributed cloud.

In this era of deglobalization, the growing importance of regulatory compliance, network resilience, and network scalability point to more distributed cloud services rather than less. Given the impact of applications that depend on low latency and high throughput, it stands to reason that distributed cloud will become the new normal. Indeed, as forecasts by Nokia Bell Labs suggest, this accelerating cloud revolution will continue to mature through 2030.