Super Cloud The New Multi Cloud

“Supercloud” to the Rescue? New Architecture Could Make Cloud Computing More Secure

Recent reports show hybrid cloud adoption growth tripled in the last year, and 80 percent of all IT budgets are expected to be committed to cloud solutions in the next 15 months. The message is pretty clear: cloud computing isn’t going anywhere and will only become more widespread.

The same could be said, however, for the hesitations many have about transferring valuable data – everything from employee information to financial records – to cloud-service providers. The high maintenance costs of private data centers are causing many providers to employ distributed cloud computing systems, which can pose reliability and security issues.

Could a “Supercloud” save the day? One team of European researchers thinks so and presents a solution in their IEEE article, “User-Centric Security and Dependability in the Clouds-of-Clouds”.

User-focused and self-managed, the Supercloud is the team’s new vision of security and dependability management for distributed cloud computing.

Challenges of Distributed Cloud Computing Systems

Distributed cloud computing systems are complex and under the complete control of providers. Users have no influence over the security, pricing or reliability of their clouds. Furthermore, the researchers say having one provider host the cloud causes it to be more vulnerable to hacking, and cloud services become less stable if the user isn’t located near one of the provider’s data centers.

The multi-cloud architecture of the Supercloud uses the distributed cloud systems of multiple providers. This better ensures users have their data hosted in the nearest data centers for all providers in the system, not just the nearest data center of a single provider.

As part of the Supercloud’s multi-cloud architecture, a security layer provides separation between the customer’s cloud and the provider-controlled cloud. This layer allows the Supercloud architecture to host user-centric clouds, or “U-Clouds,” which are specifically encrypted for each individual user, whether it is a person or corporation.

U-Clouds can be hosted through the same public or private provider, but are separated from other U-Clouds through U-Cloud boundaries created by the Supercloud security layer. As seen in the figure below, this increases the reliability of each cloud. If a U-Cloud is functioning incorrectly or is infected by a virus, the isolation of each U-Cloud prevents them from affecting others that use the same provider.

Figure 1: Diagram of the Supercloud concept

“This à la carte approach to cloud security enables full protection customizability as the customer can choose which security and availability services to deploy in his or her own cloud,” said Marc Lacoste, a Senior Research Scientist at Orange Labs.

The Supercloud architecture has four different planes (see below in red) designed to use various security and dependability services maintained by the service providers. These planes would give users control of their personal clouds, rather than surrendering control to providers. While it requires some knowledge from users, they control who can access their data and can easily transfer their data between different providers in the Supercloud architecture.

Figure 2: Sample Supercloud workflow

New Business Opportunities

The researchers believe the design of the Supercloud will create business opportunities for providers and many companies. Any establishment handling sensitive data would have incentive to transition to U-Clouds, since they provide the ability to better protect data from outside parties.

Additionally, the Supercloud architecture would allow cloud providers to offer new services as users would have more trust in cloud computing security. “The Supercloud offers business opportunities across dimensions, out of which cloud brokerage is probably the most immediate,” said Marko Vukolić, a Research Staff Member at IBM Research in Zurich. “Technology developed in the Supercloud allows the creation of value-added services that bring together resources from several, possibly untrusted, cloud providers to give users better service, more security and dependability guarantees.”

Healthcare is one example of an industry that can benefit from the Supercloud. As the volume of diagnostic imaging continues to rise, a cloud solution would keep data storage costs down. The Supercloud could provide a hospital with a secure online archive of all its images and ensure even the hospital’s provider didn’t have access to the data in their private cloud.

Though still in development, the research team has been implementing different components of the Supercloud architecture to achieve integrated proofs of concepts. Beyond healthcare, other predicted applications and business domains include cloud brokerage, blockchain and smart home security.

Amidst the development of cloud computing and the growing concern of data breaches, the Supercloud will soon be able to offer individual consumers and businesses a unique multi-cloud architecture that is more secure and dependable than other cloud computing systems.

Learn more about multi-cloud architecture in IEEE Xplore.

Follow the research team’s progress in developing the Supercloud. See their latest results at https://supercloud-project.eu/.

Supercloud: a new approach to security in a multi-cloud environment with automation

Multicloud is really not about the public clouds it’s built on. The use of multiple clouds is both an intentional strategy and the inevitable result of the nature of early cloud adoption. Beginning to emerge, such as supercloud, distributed cloud, meta cloud, abstract cloud, and cloud-native. It is an innovation enabling to benefit from “on-demand” security services for multi-cloud environments. Security and dependability of data and services in a multicloud environment: this is now possible thanks to the supercloud project.

Automation has become a requirement in any field. Data from the cloud can’t be manually manipulated, controlled, and operated; customers expect a seamless experience. Automation eliminates waste with cost policies that alert on cost anomalies and take automated actions on idle and underused resources. And supercloud improved automation across clouds, application functionality, and efficiency of certain workflows, such as the ability to conduct analytics without data movement and reduced risk of failures or cybersecurity attacks

From Multicloud to Supercloud:

The meta cloud concept will be the single focus for the next 5 to 10 years as we begin to put public clouds to work. Having a collection of cloud services managed with abstraction and automation is much more valuable than attempting to leverage each public cloud provider on its terms rather than yours. It provides a decentralized alternative to the traditional cloud computing paradigm.

Public cloud providers through abstract interfaces access specific services, such as storage, computing, artificial intelligence, data, etc. It enables freedom from the barriers set by current public or private clouds, and the combination of the deployment security that one finds in private clouds with the upscaling flexibility of public clouds.

Cloud-spanning technology allows us to use those services more effectively. It is a type of cloud delivery model in which an application is deployed and executed over multiple simultaneous cloud platforms and infrastructure. And it enables a cloud application to distribute its computations and components across one or more cloud environments. It also reduces vendor lock-in by combining several cloud solutions to form an enterprise cloud solution.

Breaking Analysis: Supercloud is becoming a thing

However, managing a multi-cloud environment can be complex, challenging, and expensive without proper planning, and execution. A meta cloud removes the complexity that multicloud brings these days. This user-centric architecture enables the user to choose, autonomously and on-demand, their protection requirements and the security services necessary to guarantee these. The medical field is far from being the only area that could benefit from this new security model in multi-cloud environments: supercloud uses are virtually limitless.

Datacenter providers, such as CoreSite, automate access from primarily enterprise customers to multiple clouds; this translates into better speeds and control for customers, more responsiveness, and an overall better customer experience. These solutions can be leveraged by similar companies that operate within their vertical markets, and are often made available as free, open-source tools. The goal is to deliver value above and beyond what’s currently available within an existing cloud platform while making it easier for teams to get what they need out of these powerful resources.

Dell Technologies is using multi-cloud strategies to place its workloads and application development where they would be most effective.

Dell Technologies has announced multi-cloud capabilities that provide a uniform experience regardless of where programs and data are stored. Dell Infrastructure also adds additional services and tools to assist developers to pick the ideal cloud environment while maintaining the security, support, and predictable pricing of Dell infrastructure.

The multi-cloud framework has enabled most enterprises to make use of the cloud’s benefits without being bound to a single provider while keeping prices reasonable. While the multi-cloud gives them more freedom in managing their workflows and other tasks, there’s no disputing that its appealing pricing is a big reason why companies choose it. Although choosing multi-cloud is less expensive, the fact is that complexity that comes with this option is something that most firms are only realizing after making this decision. Multi-cloud has numerous benefits and maybe a game-changer for companies in their transformation journey. Getting all of the data and workloads housed on various servers, however, is a challenge.

Operational complexity, inconsistency, and various siloed IT environments are all common trade-offs in the multi-cloud paradigm. These issues jeopardize some of the cloud’s primary benefits, posing efficiency, financial, security, and competitive threats. As a result, IT organizations want solutions that enable them to offset these trade-offs to provide a genuinely integrated experience across all of their environments, allowing them to pick where and how they operate based on what is best for the company rather than the operational location.

“As data becomes more spread across on-premises and colocation data canters, various public clouds and edge settings, today’s multi-cloud reality is difficult,” said Jeff Boudreau, president, of Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. “We have the industry’s widest technology portfolio, consistent tools, expertise developing open ecosystems, and industry-leading data storage capabilities, services, and supply chain. All of this puts Dell in a unique position to assist clients to manage their multi-cloud strategy.”

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, stated in his keynote talk at Dell Technologies World 2022 (DTW) that the argument between on-prem and off-prem is over. Multi-cloud, he believes, is the way of the future, with workloads and data moving effortlessly across the whole ecosystem. According to Dell, 90 percent of customers now have both on-premises and public cloud environments. And seventy-five percent use three or more distinct clouds.

Organizations require solutions to address the challenges of different environments and organizational requirements. Here are three things to think about if you want to maximize the benefits of multi-cloud:

Consider going beyond public clouds to bring the cloud’s speed and agility to any location

Organizations are increasingly turning to cloud and services-based infrastructure because of the speed and agility it provides in meeting changing business demands and responding rapidly to change. Furthermore, many are managing both on-premises and cloud systems, with an increasing number of applications in co-located or edge locations. Organizations require the capacity to swiftly grow to meet demand and aim to enhance their operational flexibility by employing a pay as you go services to be able to pivot fast to answer rapidly changing company demands or market changes. Most crucially, they require adaptability regardless of location, whether in a private or public cloud, a co-lo, or at the edge. Many businesses see multi-cloud as a way to take advantage of new technologies.

With a consistent toolkit, you can manage the complexity of multi-cloud

The majority of businesses currently use several public and private cloud platforms, with 92 percent claiming to have a multi-cloud strategy and 82 percent using a hybrid cloud. While this might lead to more agile and speedier development, it can also lead to more complexity. As a result, businesses may face a slew of issues, including policy enforcement, security, compliance, cost management, and maintaining service levels. Organizations confront the problems of managing and operating different systems, as well as having specialist personnel educated and up to date, with multiple platforms to handle. Because all control planes and toolsets are centralized, teams just have to learn one tool and apply it everywhere, reducing complexity and operational strain.

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Defend against single points of failure in the future

As more businesses rely on the public cloud, the risk of unplanned events—outages, natural disasters, criminal actors, or just plain old human error—increases. Protecting against single points of failure is more important than ever. Organizations desire the freedom and flexibility to run their workloads wherever they choose, which might include using several public or private clouds for redundancy and mobility. This also adds to the protection against vendor lock-in. While some firms have found it straightforward to migrate their data to the cloud, others have found it difficult to repatriate data or relocate to another cloud.

Dell Technologies is also improving software throughout its industry-leading storage portfolio, resulting in improved intelligence, automation, cyber resiliency, and multi-cloud flexibility.

Customers desire the convenience and agility of the cloud experience everywhere they operate, not just in the public cloud, according to Sam Grocott, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Business Unit (DTBU) Marketing in a blog post. As a result, the DTW announcements will provide enterprises the option to choose, allowing them to fully realize the multi-cloud potential.

Dell has extended its cooperation with AWS by announcing CyberSense for Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS. Adaptive analytics, scanning metadata, and whole files, as well as machine learning and forensic technologies, will enable organizations to find, diagnose, and speed up data recovery. It can also monitor files and databases for signs of a cyberattack and retrieve the last known incorruptible copy of data for a faster, more secure, and confidential recovery.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

SUPERCLOUD is an innovation enabling to benefit from “on-demand” security services for multi-cloud environments.

Why SUPERCLOUD?

After adopting the Cloud to increase productivity, agility, and reduce operational costs, companies are now relying on multiple cloud service providers, 5 on average according to Gartner (2018), we call this multi-cloud strategy. This evolution is due to the desires both to no longer be dependent upon one single provider, but also to benefit from the most agile and most innovative solutions on the market, with higher levels of availability. Multi-cloud however means new security issues. For, in a context where, according to the Going Hybrid study (carried out for NTT Communications in March 2018), 84% of European businesses have adopted a multi-cloud approach, guaranteeing interoperability and flexibility in exploiting data, services and communication, therefore their security and dependability, has become a major issue. This is the challenge that the SUPERCLOUD project has managed to take up thanks to the European Union’s largest research and innovation programme, “Horizon 2020”, aimed at stimulating Europe’s economic competitivity.

“Horizon 2020”: a synergy of skills at the service of innovation

The aim of the actions of “Horizon 2020” is to foster collaboration between public and private sectors so as to develop research and innovation. With its partners from the consortium selected and financed by this programme, Orange is at the origin of a three-year project aiming to create a new and unprecedented secure Cloud infrastructure: the open source SUPERCLOUD framework, presented to the European Commission during its final review on 15th March this year in Brussels.

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It is dedicated to the development of “on-demand” security services for multi-cloud environments. The SUPERCLOUD consortium unites nine organisations: industrial partners, research institutes, SMEs, and universities *, coming from six European countries and widely recognised in their respective scientific and technological fields. Each partner contributes its leading expertise, for example data protection for IBM, system security for Darmstadt University, security policies and network security for the Institut Mines Télécom, network virtualisation for the University of Lisbon, or the medical field for pilot projects carried out for Philips Healthcare and Electronics and for Maxdata Software. Furthermore, Technikon managed the administrative coordination of the project. Marc Lacoste, researcher in security at Orange specifies: “Orange’s teams, in synergy with the partners, defined a scientific vision of the project, and piloted it from a technical viewpoint”. Plus, Orange provided its expertise to design and develop the SUPERCLOUD technology through production of several components of the framework, for example those linked to virtualisation for multi-cloud, advanced cryptography for flexible data protection, or supervision of virtualised network security.

A user-centric Cloud or “U-Cloud”

In a multi-cloud environment, the general lack of interoperability and flexibility poses security and dependability problems. Furthermore, as each provider imposes its own security services – the “lock-in” phenomenon – it is difficult to configure them to closely adapt to user needs.

The SUPERCLOUD framework thus proposes a new approach to the management of security and of the availability of multi-cloud environments. This user-centric architecture enables the user to choose, autonomously and on-demand, their protection requirements and the security services necessary to guarantee these. In this way, the user defines “U-Clouds”, or isolated sets of services and data operating in multi-clouds. Their security is ensured thanks to the SUPERCLOUD framework, or security layer, deployed over existing public or private Clouds, separating user Clouds from those of providers.

“The SUPERCLOUD vision is built around four requirements: security must be in self-service mode, i.e. completely at the hand of the user; it must also be guaranteed end-to-end, i.e. transversely to all of the systems; equally, it must be automated, so self-managed; and finally, it must guarantee resilience, meaning resisting failures”.

The Commission’s assessors congratulated the consortium for the progress made, and in particular for the very high scientific and technical level of its solution. Thanks to this experiment, Orange brought to the fore the excellence of its research in the field of security. Notably via the dissemination of over 40 project articles in distinguished international publications, the coordination of a “Vision Paper” published at the IEEE, and even the co-organisation of several workshops such as during the ACM EuroSys 2017 conference.

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SUPERCLOUD for all, an example in the medical imaging field

Who can benefit from this new approach? All Cloud providers and companies that handle sensitive customer data and who wish nevertheless to benefit from the advantages of the Cloud. “The SUPERCLOUD enables freedom from the barriers set by current public or privates Clouds, and the combining of the deployment security that one finds in private Clouds with the upscaling flexibility of public Clouds”.

To prove this, the consortium completed, inter alia, a pilot project of a distributed medical imaging platform. Medical imaging is used more and more to perform telemedicine or diagnostic assistance for example. Hospitals store these images in several Clouds, and often need to send this data to each other, in a completely secure manner. To do this, the consortium deployed a distributed platform implementing the SUPERCLOUD framework. Hospitals can thus manage their imaging data exchanges thanks to an infrastructure that is powerful enough to guarantee both data dependability – for it to be accessible from any place at any time, and its security – to prevent it from being taken or used by unauthorised persons.

The medical field is far from being the only area that could benefit from this new security model in multi-cloud environments: “SUPERCLOUD uses are virtually limitless. As the framework is open, it can easily be used by all professions with specific security needs, like those of the financial sector for example, or the automobile industry, and of course all Cloud operators themselves”.

Orange is a major player in network security performance research, serving the development of emerging technologies that will be included in the innovative uses of tomorrow. To achieve this, the company initiates and carries out pioneering scientific research, teaming up with the best researchers in their fields. Its major participation in the SUPERCLOUD project is a superb demonstration of this.

Its a Cloud.. its a SuperComputer.. no, its SuperCloud!

The rise of the supercloud

Last week’s AWS re:Invent conference underscored the degree to which cloud computing generally and Amazon Web Services Inc. specifically have disrupted the technology landscape. From making infrastructure deployment simpler to accelerating the pace of innovation to the formation of the world’s most active and vibrant technology ecosystem, it’s clear that AWS has been the No. 1 force for industry change in the last decade.

Going forward, we see three high-level contributions from AWS that will drive the next 10 years of innovation: 1) the degree to which data will play a defining role in determining winners and losers; 2) the knowledge assimilation effect of AWS’ cultural processes such as two-pizza teams, customer obsession and working backwards; and 3) the rise of superclouds – that is, clouds built on top of hyperscale infrastructure that focus not only on information technology transformation, but on deeper business integration and digital transformation of entire industries.

In this Breaking Analysis, we’ll review some of the takeaways from the 10th annual AWS re:Invent conference and focus on how we see the rise of superclouds will have big impacts on the future of virtually all industries.

It’s happening

AWS re:Invent 2021 was the most important hybrid tech event of the year. No one really knew what the crowd would be like, but well over 20,000 people came to re:Invent, and probably an additional 5,000 to 10,000 folks came without badges to have meetings and do networking off the expo floor. So somewhere well north of 25,000 people physically attended the event, with 200,000-plus more online — huge for this year.

One of the most telling moments at re:Invent was a conversation with Steve Mullaney, chief executive of networking company Aviatrix Systems Inc. Just before we went on theCUBE, Nick Sturiale, managing partner at Ignition Partners, one of Aviatrix’ venture capital backers, looked at Steve and said: “It’s happening.”

What Sturiale meant by “It’s happening” is that the next era of cloud innovation is here and is beginning in earnest. The cloud is expanding out to the edge: AWS is bringing its operating model, application programming interfaces, primitives and services to more and more locations. Companies such as Aviatrix, and many others, are building capabilities on top of the cloud that don’t exist from the cloud providers today. And their strategy is to move fast in their respective domains to stay ahead and add value.

Yes, data and machine learning are critical – we talk about that all the time — but the ecosystem flywheel was so evident at this year’s re:Invent. Partners were charged up. There wasn’t nearly as much chatter about AWS competing with them. Rather, there was much more excitement around the value these partners are creating on top of AWS’ massive platform.

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Despite aggressive marketing from competitive hyperscalers, other cloud providers and as-a-service on-premises and hybrid offerings, AWS’ lead appears to be accelerating. A notable example is AWS’ efforts around custom silicon. Far more companies, especially independent software vendors, are tapping into AWS’ silicon advancements.

We saw the announcement of Graviton3 and new chips for training and inference. As we’ve reported extensively, AWS is on a curve that will outpace Intel Corp.’s x86 chips in performance, price/performance, cost, power consumption and speed of innovation. And its Nitro platform is giving AWS and its partners the greatest degree of optionality in the industry – from central processing units, graphics processing units, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Nvidia Corp. and, very importantly, Arm-based custom silicon springing from AWS’ acquisition of Annapurna Labs.

AWS started its custom silicon journey in 2008 and has invested massive resources into this effort. Other hyperscalers, which have the scale economics to justify such efforts, are just recently announcing initiatives in this regard. Others that don’t have the scale will be relying on third-party silicon providers– a perfectly reasonable strategy.

But because AWS has control of the entire software and hardware stack, we believe it has a strategic advantage in this respect. Silicon especially is a domain where – to quote Amazon.com Inc. CEO and former AWS CEO Andy Jassy – there is no compression algorithm for experience. Being on the curve matters. A lot.

And the biggest trend in our view this past week was the clear emergence of superclouds.

Rise of the supercloud

In his 2020 book “Rise of the Data Cloud,” written with Steve Hamm, Snowflake Inc. CEO Frank Slootman laid out the premise for the emergence of data cloud, a title that we’ve stolen in part for this Breaking Analysis — thank you, Frank Slootman. In his book, he made a case for companies to put data at the center of their organizations – rather than organizing just around people, for example.

The idea is to create data networks. Although people are of course critical, organizing around data and enabling people to access and share data will lead to the democratization of data and network effects will kick in – kicking off a renaissance in business productivity.

Essentially this is Metcalfe’s Law for data. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, put forth the premise when we both worked for Pat McGovern at IDG. It states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users on the network. Thought of another way, the first connection isn’t so valuable but the billionth is really valuable.

Slootman’s Law, if you will, says the more people that have access to the data (governed of course) and the more data connections that can be shared, the more value will be realized from that data. Exponential value, in fact.

What is a supercloud?

Supercloud is a term we first referenced in the post led by John Furrier prior to re:Invent. Supercloud describes an architecture that taps the underlying services and primitives of hyperscale clouds to deliver additional value above and beyond what’s available from public cloud providers. A supercloud delivers capabilities through software, consumed as services, and can run on a single hyperscale cloud or span multiple clouds.

In fact, to the degree that a supercloud can span multiple clouds — and on-premises workloads — and hide the underlying complexity of the infrastructure supporting this work, the more adoption and value will be realized.

We’ve listed some examples above of what we consider to be superclouds in the making. Snowflake is one of our favorite to cite and we use it frequently. It’s building a data cloud that spans multiple clouds and supports distributed data, but governs that data centrally – somewhat consistent with the data mesh approach.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. announced at re:Invent this year a new data management cloud — the “Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data with AWS.” We’ll come back to that later in more detail, but it’s a prime example of an industry supercloud.

Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman spoke at the day one keynote and talked about the supercloud it’s building. Dish Network Corp. is building a supercloud to power 5G wireless networks. United Airlines Inc. is, at this time, focused on porting applications to AWS as part of its digital transformation, but eventually we predict it will start building out a supercloud travel platform. What was most significant about the United effort is the best practices it’s borrowing from AWS, such as small teams and moving fast. AWS is teaching customers how to build a culture to support the buildout of superclouds.

But many others that we’ve listed above are on a supercloud journey. Just some of the folks we talked to at re:Invent that are building clouds on top of clouds are shown. Cohesity Inc. is building out a data management supercloud focused on data protection and governance. Hashicorp announced its IPO at a $13 billion valuation– building an IT automation supercloud. Databricks Inc., ChaosSearch Inc., Zscaler Inc., which is building a security supercloud, and many others that we spoke with at the event.

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Castles in the cloud

We want to take a moment to talk about “Castles in the Cloud.” It’s a premise put forth by Jerry Chen and the team at Greylock. It’s a really important piece of work that is building out a dataset and categorizing the various cloud services to understand better where the cloud giants are investing and where startups can participate, how companies can play in the castles built by the hyperscalers, how they can cross the moats that have been built and where the innovation opportunities exist.

Superclouds are strong examples of companies leveraging the castles and crossing the moats built by hyperscalers.

Only four players have built hyperscale castles

Frequently, we’re challenged about our statements that there are only four hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Although we recognize that certain companies, Oracle Corp. in particular, have done a good job of improving and building out their clouds, we don’t consider companies such as IBM Corp. and other smaller managed service providers to be hyperscalers. One of the main data points we use to defend our thinking is capital investment. There are many other key performance indicators such as size of ecosystem, partner acceleration and enablement and feature sets, but capital expenditure investment is a big factor in our thinking.

Above is a chart from Platformonomics LLC, a firm that’s obsessed with CapEx, showing annual CapEx spend for five cloud companies – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. This data runs through 2019 and we’ve superimposed the direction each company is headed. Amazon spent more than $40 billion on CapEx in 2020 and will spend more than $50 billion this year. Sure, there are warehouses and other capital expenses in those numbers, but the vast majority is spent on building out its cloud infrastructure.

Same with Google and Microsoft. Oracle is at least increasing its CapEx to $4 billion — but it’s de minimis compared with the cloud giants. IBM is headed in the other direction – choosing to invest $34 billion in acquiring Red Hat instead of putting its capital into cloud infrastructure. It’s a reasonable strategy, but it underscores the gap and to us strongly supports the premise.

Update: According to Charles Fitzgerald, author of Platformonomics, 60% to 70% of Google and Microsoft capital spending goes toward data centers. His estimate for Amazon is under 50% — perhaps as low as 30% because of the large investment in warehouses and logistics. These revised assumptions would place each of these cloud providers in the $15 billion annual capex range, still substantially larger than the other firms cited above.

IaaS revenue as an indicator

Another key metric we track is infrastructure-as-a-service revenue.

Above is an updated chart from the one we showed last month, which at the time excluded Alibaba’s most recent quarter. The change was not material, but the four hyperscalers, which invested more than $100 billion in CapEx last year, will together generate more than $120 billion in revenue this year. And they’re growing at 41% collectively. That is remarkable for such a large base of revenue. And for AWS, the rate of revenue growth is accelerating.

The point is, if you’re going to build a supercloud, why wouldn’t you start by building on top of these platforms (notwithstanding concerns about China with respect to Alibaba)?

How some early superclouds are performing

Supercloud is not a category within the ETR taxonomy. But we can evaluate some of the companies we’ve been following that we see as building superclouds by looking at ETR survey data. The chart above plots Net Score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and Market Share or presence in the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. Most every name on the chart is building a supercloud of some sort.

Let’s start by calling out AWS and Azure. They stand alone as the cloud leaders. You can debate what’s included in Azure and our previous chart on revenue attempts to strip out the Microsoft SaaS business, but this is a customer view. Customers see Microsoft as a cloud leader – which it is – so that’s why its presence is larger than AWS even though its IaaS revenue is significantly smaller. But they both have strong momentum on the vertical axis as shown by that red horizontal line. Remember, anything above that is considered elevated.

- Google cloud, as you see, is well behind those two leaders.

- Snowflake’s data cloud as supercloud

Look at Snowflake. We realize we repeat this often, but Snowflake continues to hold a Net Score in the mid-to-high 70’s and, at 165 mentions – which you can see in the inserted table – continues to expand its market presence.

Of all the technology companies we track, we feel Snowflake’s vision and execution on its data cloud strategy is the most prominent example of a supercloud. Truly, every tech company should be paying attention to Snowflake’s moves and carving out unique value propositions for their customers by standing on the shoulders of cloud giants (as ChaosSearch CEO Ed Walsh likes to say as his company contemplates its supercloud buildout).

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On-prem dependency creates a wide range of supercloud maturity

In general, the more cloud-native the firm’s offering, the further along they’ll be toward building a supercloud — and the greater the momentum they’ll have. But typically these firms are coming from a smaller installed base and have foreclosed on the on-premises opportunity (for now).

On the left hand side of the chart above, you can see a number of companies we spoke with that are in various stages of building out their superclouds. Databricks, ThoughSpot Inc., DataRobot Inc., Zscaler, HashiCorp, Elastic N.V., Confluent Inc. – all above the 40% line. And somewhat below that line but still respectable, are those with a significant on-prem presence – VMware Inc. with Tanzu, Cohesity Inc., Rubrik Inc. and Veeam Software Inc. And there are many others that we didn’t necessarily talk to at re:Invent or they don’t show up in the ETR data set.

Cisco, Dell, HPE and IBM

We’ve called out Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and IBM on the chart because they all have large on-premises installed bases and different points of view. To varying degrees they are each building superclouds.

But to be frank, these large companies are first protecting their respective on-prem turf. You can’t blame them. They are all adding as-a-service offerings, which is cloudlike. They will rightly fight hard and compete on their respective portfolios, channels and vastly improved simplicity.

But when speaking to customers at re:Invent – and these are not just startups we talk to, since we’re talking about customers of enterprise tech companies like these – the customers want to build on AWS. They will fully admit they can’t or won’t move everything out of their data centers, but the vast majority of customers we spoke with have much more momentum around moving toward AWS.

Yes, of course there’s some recency bias because we just got back from re:Invent and it’s a conference full of Amazon customers, but the pace of play, the business savvy and the transformative mindset of these customers is obvious. And the numbers we shared earlier simply don’t lie. These customers are among the firms consuming technology and transforming their business at the most rapid pace.

Regarding these four players, they are starting to move in the supercloud direction — but they are late to the party. Nonetheless, a big strategic advantage is they have more credibility around multicloud than the hyperscalers. But on balance, AWS’ overall lead is accelerating in our opinion, the gap in my opinion is not closing.

A new breed of tech companies is emerging

In and around 2010 and 2011 we collaborated with two individuals who shaped our thinking about the big-data market. Peter Goldmacher at the time was a sell-side analyst at Cowen & Co. and Abhi Mehta was with Bank of America, transforming the bank’s data operations. Goldmacher said at the time that it was the buyers of big-data technologies – and those that applied it to their operations — that would create the most value. He posited that they would create far more value than Cloudera Inc. or Hortonworks Inc., for example, and a collection of other big data players. Clearly he was right.

Mehta was a shining example of that premise and he posited on theCUBE that ecosystems would evolve within vertical industries around data — and the confluence of data and technology and machine intelligence would power the next generation of value creation.

Fast forward and apply this thinking to 2021….

Superclouds form around industries and data

Just after the first re:Invent, we published a post on Wikibon about the making of a new gorilla – AWS. And we said the way to compete would be to take an industry focus and become best-of-breed within your industry. We aligned with Mehta’s view that industry ecosystems would evolve around data and offer opportunities for nonhyperscalers to add value. What we didn’t predict at the time – but are seeing clearly emerge – is that these superclouds will be built on top of AWS and other clouds.

Goldman’s Financial Cloud for data is taking a page out of Amazon’s retail business: pointing its proprietary data, algorithms, tools and processes at its clients and making these assets available as a service on top of the AWS cloud. It’s a supercloud for financial services. It is relying on AWS for infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, security and services around machine learning to power its supercloud.

Nasdaq and Dish are similarly bringing forth their unique value. As we said earlier, United Airlines will in our view eventually evolve from migrating its apps to the cloud to building out a supercloud for travel.

This trend is taking shape in virtually every industry and geography and will establish a new breed of disruptive winners. Incumbents that move fast and capitalize on this trend will thrive in our view.

What about your logo? What is your supercloud strategy? We’re sure you’ve been thinking about it. Or perhaps you’re already well down the road. We’d love to hear how you’re doing it and whether you see the trends the same or differently.

Answering the top 10 questions about SuperCloud