Hybrid clouds: A new twist on an old trick

nformation Week's John Soat had an interesting post entitled "Cloud computing: What's a hybrid cloud and where can I get one?" As John puts it: "Hybrid clouds are the Big Foot of cloud computing: tantalizing but difficult to conceive of and frustratingly elusive to the point of arousing deep skepticism on the part of potentially interested parties. Are they real or a myth?"

This kind of stuff drives me crazy. We've been using architectures like this for some time, including when I was in college. Back then compute resources, such as supercomputers, were both expensive and in short supply. Thus, many of us building solutions would use hybrid architectures to leverage remotely hosted supercomputers only when needed. For the most part we processed locally, but when supercomputing MIPS were required, we'd send jobs to some supercomputer thousands of miles away. This included virtualization and multitenancy, albeit old-school stuff.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/hybrid-clouds-new-twist-old-trick-514