Distributed cloud is a public cloud computing service that lets you run public cloud infrastructure in multiple locations—your own cloud provider's data centers, other cloud providers' data centers, third-party data centers or colocation centers, and on-premises—manage everything from a single control plane.
With this targeted, centrally managed distribution of public cloud services, your business can deploy and run applications or individual application components in a mix of cloud locations and environments that best meets your requirements for performance, regulatory compliance, and more. Distributed cloud resolves the operational and management inconsistencies that can occur in hybrid cloud or multicloud environments.
Most important, distributed cloud provides the ideal foundation for edge computing—running servers and applications closer to where data is created.
The demand for distributed cloud and edge computing is driven primarily by Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), telecommunications (telco) and other applications that need to process huge amounts of data in real time. But distributed cloud is also helping companies surmount the challenges of complying with country- or industry-specific data privacy regulations—and, more recently, providing IT services to employees and users redistributed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
How distributed cloud works
You might have heard of distributed computing, in which application components are spread across different networked computers, and communicate with one another through messaging or APIs, with the goal of improving overall application performance or maximizing computing efficiency.
Distributed cloud goes a giant step further by distributing a public cloud provider's entire compute stack to wherever a customer might need it—on-premises in the customer's own data center or private cloud, or off-premises in one or more public cloud data centers that might or might not belong to the cloud provider.
In effect, distributed cloud extends the provider's centralized cloud with geographically distributed micro-cloud satellites. The cloud provider retains central control over the operations, updates, governance, security and reliability of all distributed infrastructure.
The customer accesses everything—the centralized cloud services, and the satellites wherever they are located—as a single cloud and manages it all from a single control plane. In this way, as industry analyst Gartner puts it, distributed cloud fixes with hybrid cloud and hybrid multicloud breaks.
Advantages of a distributed cloud
- Less latency. By moving processing tasks closer to end users, distributed cloud services can minimize latency and increase the responsiveness of applications.
- Greater scalability. Distributed cloud architecture makes it easier for organizations to quickly expand to edge locations without building out new data centers.
- Increase visibility. Organizations can use a single console to manage and monitor activity within hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructure that forms a distributed cloud.
- Improved reliability. Distributed systems are inherently more fault-tolerant and offer greater redundancy. If cloud services in one location go offline, organizations can continue to access cloud services from other distributed locations.
Limitations of a distributed cloud
- Security issues. With data and infrastructure distributed throughout the world, managing data and cloud network security can be more challenging.
- Backups. Backing up and recovering data from a distributed architecture can be more complicated, as many regulations require data to stay in specific locations.
- Availability. The various locations in a distributed cloud environment may have different connectivity models and capacities, limiting bandwidth and requiring upgrades to slower connections.
- Complexity. Distributed computing systems are more difficult to deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot than centralized cloud computing implementations.
- Cost. Distributed cloud computing systems require a larger investment up front, and adding capacity for increased processing may add to the initial expense.
Use cases for distributed cloud
- Improved hybrid cloud or multicloud visibility and manageability: Distributed cloud can help any organization gain greater control over its hybrid multicloud infrastructure by providing visibility and management from one console, with a single set of tools.
- Efficient, cost-effective scalability and agility: It's expensive and time-consuming to expand a dedicated data center or to build out new data center locations in different geographies. With distributed cloud, an organization can expand to existing infrastructure or edge locations without physical buildout, and can develop and deploy anywhere in the environment quickly, by using the same tools and personnel.
- Easier industry or localized regulatory compliance: Many data privacy regulations specify that a user's personal information (PI) cannot travel outside the user's country. Distributed cloud infrastructure makes it much easier for an organization to process PI in each user's country of residence. Processing data at its source can also simplify compliance with data privacy regulations in healthcare, telecommunications and other industries.
- Faster content delivery: A content delivery network (CDN) deployed on a distributed cloud can improve streaming video content performance—and the user experience—by storing and delivering video content from locations closer to users.
- IoT, (AI) and machine-learning applications: Video surveillance, manufacturing automation, self-driving cars, healthcare applications, smart buildings and other applications rely on real-time data analysis that can't wait for data to travel to a central cloud data center and back. Distributed cloud and edge computing deliver the low latency these applications demand.
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