Azure Stack, AWS Outposts Poised to Impact Colocation

Since the dawn of the cloud era in the mid-2000s, the colocation industry has generally thought of itself as an alternative to the public cloud. “Cloud vs. colo” is a dichotomy to which most have become accustomed.

Hybrid cloud and colocation don’t have to be an either/or proposition.

That thinking made sense for most of the past two decades, when public cloud providers and colocation data centers were indeed in stiff competition. Over the past several years, however, things have changed. The largest public cloud providers have rolled out a new generation of hybrid cloud solutions that make it easy for customers to access public cloud services while housing their workloads in their own or a colocation data center.

Here’s a look at what these hybrid cloud services entail and what they mean for the future of colocation.

Cloud vs. Colo: The Traditional Choice

It’s easy to understand why the public cloud and colocation were traditionally portrayed as an either/or proposition.

If you chose to run workloads in the public cloud, you got access to a range of different services. You could spin up those services almost instantaneously. What you lost, however, was the privacy and control that come with hosting workloads in a colocation data center. Customers there had greater ability to choose which hardware they use and how it is configured; also, how it is isolated from other organizations’ resources.

On the other hand, colocation providers couldn’t offer the flexibility or broad range of services of public cloud providers. They specialized only in infrastructure.

For much of the 2010s, it seemed that the public cloud proved to be the more appealing option for many companies, which increasingly migrated to the public cloud. Although they didn’t always stay there – some moved back to colocation – it would nonetheless be hard to argue that the colocation industry enjoyed as much momentum over the past decade as did public cloud computing. If nothing else, revenue data shows that the public cloud has grown more quickly than colocation.

Modern Hybrid Cloud Meets Colocation

Somewhat ironically, public cloud vendors’ efforts in recent years to grow their own market share even further changed the landscape. Today, thanks to new hybrid cloud frameworks that public cloud companies themselves have introduced, it has become quite feasible to take advantage of public cloud services while keeping workloads inside a colocation center.

Chief among those frameworks are:

• Azure Stack, which lets customers deploy services from the Microsoft Azure cloud on their own hardware. Azure Arc, a newer service that remains in development, will do the same thing in an even more flexible way.
• AWS Outposts, a framework for running services from the AWS cloud on private hardware.
• Anthos, a Kubernetes-based platform from Google that makes it possible to build a consistent deployment and management layer for applications deployed across multiple clouds or data centers.

Each of these hybrid cloud offerings has its limitations, especially when used to extend public cloud services into a colocation facility. Azure Stack only works with certified hardware, which colocation providers might not offer. (Azure Arc, which is not subject to this limitation, might prove more useful in colocation centers for this reason.) AWS Outposts is even more restrictive; it requires customers to use AWS’ own hardware, although Amazon says it is compatible with colocation scenarios. Google Anthos works with any hardware, but its major caveat is that …