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It is difficult to overemphasize how much “The Cloud” has become a mainstay of the Silicon Valley zeitgeist since its meteoric ascendancy from 2008 onward. Consequently, it may seem like an impossibly far-fetched idea that the growth and evolution of the cloud was a phenomenon as artificial as the interest rates which fueled it. The public cloud has witnessed roughly 2350% growth between the years 2008 and 2020, with even more headwind made immediately following the COVID-19 response and global lock downs. This particular spike in growth has been reasonably traced to the skyrocketing demand for digital services from an unprecedentedly shut-in population. But here’s something else this period had in common with the initial 2008 takeoff: historically low interest rates. Federal Funds&nbsp;Rates Since the 2008 financial crisis, central banks around the world have maintained historically low interest rates to stimulate economic growth and recovery. These artificially low interest rates have had an expansive range of effects on the economy, including influencing the growth and evolution of the public cloud. Recently, interest rates have experienced a sudden and sharp reversal. Correspondingly, the decade-long trend of ceaseless migration of digital infrastructure to hyperscalers has also witnessed its first major slowdown and vocal push backs. This article will explore the causative connection between low interest rates and the expansion of public cloud services. Furthermore, we’ll be discussing the alternatives to the public cloud paradigm that are poised to surge in growth, and what that means for various players in the industry. Interest Rates and the Public Cloud Growth The tech industry does not operate in a vacuum and is heavily influenced by macroeconomic forces in simultaneously subtle and dramatically impactful ways. We’ve already pointed at the correlation between the rapid growth of the cloud and historically low interest rates beginning in 2008. But to explore the causative mechanisms at play between these concepts, we need to ensure we understand the economic backdrop of the cloud’s development.First and foremost, interest rates represent the cost of borrowing money, which is ultimately determined by the Federal Reserve and other central banks worldwide. When interest rates are pushed artificially low, liquidity is abundant and inexpensive, resulting in both profound and non-obvious downstream impacts on the behaviors and trends of entire economic sectors. In such conditions, companies and investors are strongly incentivized to pursue riskier investments and are more likely to take on debt and fundraising to finance their ventures. The market begins optimizing for growth, often and even inevitably at the cost of capital efficiency, fiscal discipline, and long-term strategic planning. This is due to the reality that if a company is not leveraging the lower interest rates and increased credit availability to focus on growth while their competitors are, they are unlikely to survive. Consequently, all market participants eventually adopt similar optimization strategies. This leads to the development of entire industries on shaky foundations that would have been impractical and imprudent outside of the influence of extraordinary macroeconomic conditions. It’s only once conditions return to the norm, that the decision making that seemed sound and rational previously is met with a harsh dose of reality. When interest rates have been kept low for an unprecedented amount of time, it should be no surprise then that the downstream consequences too are unprecedented. Most obvious amongst these consequences has been the total fragility of the financial system, as highlighted by the recent collapses of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank, in rapid response to the semi-normalization in interest rates. This is only the tip of the iceberg, and the longer interest rates remain raised, the more the economic growth of the last decade will be shown to have severe structural problems. In the case of cloud computing, there are already signs that a half a trillion dollar industry that came to maturity entirely in this easy money time period is in trouble. Condensing the Cloud What do we mean when we talk about the “The Cloud”? For most, the public cloud is defined solely by the outsourcing of hardware management to a specialized provider. Despite the adage, the cloud isn’t just someone else’s computer. To be abundantly clear, there are incredibly good reasons for companies to outsource the physical management of compute to other market players better suited to the task. These decisions are rooted in the simple ideas of comparative advantage and economic specialization.&nbsp;However the major hyperscalers in the cloud oligopoly (AWS, GCP, Azure) share specific traits which define the entirety of their business models, modes of operation, and trade-offs that are far more nuanced than simply outsourcing hardware management. These massive platforms derive most of their usage, stickiness, and earnings not from compute alone, but ultimately from the additional services and tools tightly bundled with that compute. This includes a vast catalog ranging from managed databases, to identity management, CDNs, managed orchestration tools like Kubernetes, and so much more. In essence, the hyperscale cloud providers today are an intricate and often confoundingly complex array of proprietary tools and managed services. Why? To lock users into their platforms by bundling their software and services add-ons with their hardware. Want to switch to using a competitor’s compute resources instead? Not so fast: a cobweb of interlocking managed software dependencies now keeps you tethered to your host with no easy way out. This is the cloud today: a few major walled gardens defined by the bundling of hardware, software, and services in an effort to de-commoditize what is and should be a commodity business: supplying compute.&nbsp;The resulting size, concentration, and control over digital infrastructure that these providers leverage have subsequently become a far cry from the early visions of an open and decentralized internet. This state of affairs is a direct result of the macroeconomic incentives that have been in place almost continuously since 2008.&nbsp; All That Glitters isn’t Gold The deliberately “bundled” design of the cloud offers a clear tradeoff: speed over portability and flexibility. Lack of portability results in higher fiscal costs to customers, especially long term, as these providers know moving to a competitor is no trivial matter. The more services and tools customers use from their current cloud host, the more they are disadvantaged over time as the cost of migrating to a competitor tends to only increase. While using these more easily integrated tools and managed services to increase productivity and optimize for growth may have seemed like a straightforward choice to the customer it is ultimately a Faustian bargain. For most players operating in an economic environment defined by unprecedentedly low interest rates, this optimization for immediate growth over longer term considerations made total economic sense.In such a case, fundraising is easy, and as such fiscal discipline is not as valued by investors as speed to market and growth at all costs. If this sounds far fetched, believe me, it was extremely common up to early 2022 for angels and VCs to tell portfolio companies they weren’t spending money fast enough. When cash is cheap, other things are simply more important, and rationally so within the context of the economic environment. The costs of increasingly large AWS bills hardly registered as long as revenue growth continued and fundraising remained extremely easy, both themselves buoyed by low interest rates driving less discretionary spending all across the economy. If your competitors are leveraging the dynamics of the easy money environment, and you’re not, you’re likely dead in the water before the longer term considerations even matter. However unlike death or taxes, artificially low interest rates aren’t and can never be constant. As inflation concerns began to reach fever pitch over the last year, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have quickly reversed course by aggressively hiking interest rates once more. Very abruptly, the calculus driving economic decision making has turned on its head, and the impact on many industries, like banking, have been hard and obvious. Many other’s have been heavily impacted as well, albeit less dramatically. For now. The cloud included. Revenue and fundraising capabilities are both sinking in lockstep, and suddenly the abrupt need for aggressive fiscal discipline for the first time in over a decade is bringing to light certain glaringly obvious truths.&nbsp; The Cloud Doesn’t Actually Make Much Sense As it turns out, making yourself entirely reliant on a single provider with absolute leverage over your infrastructure is a really bad deal if you actually have to think long term or care about fiduciary responsibilities. That’s the conclusion many companies are rapidly coming to, a notable recent example being 37 Signals, as explained by co-founder David Hansson the creator of Ruby on Rails.In their effort to move from the Cloud, the team at 37Signals has built MRSK, a framework to help manage higher level tooling and application orchestration on top of raw compute, completely agnostic to where that compute is hosted. This serves a crucial function: It effectively helps unbundle some of the functionality typically bundled by cloud providers, giving you greater portability and control over your software. There is still a bit more additional work involved with this solution compared to ready-to-go cloud tooling to be sure, but MRSK and tools like it are relatively niche and underdeveloped, especially when compared to the vast investment the public cloud tooling has seen over the past decade plus.These tools and the paradigm it represents offers a starkly different alternative to how the cloud works today. By simply buying or renting raw compute and running the open source infrastructure stack of your choice on top of it, an “un-bundling” occurs which undoes the position of power the cloud oligopoly have created for themselves while the industry has slept. In this model, businesses can crucially still leverage more specialized third parties to manage their physical compute in the actual actual data center, and still leverage third party software to maximize their productivity, but in a portable and natively agnostic fashion. In our now higher interest rate environment, that reality of cloud costs and it’s long term implications for organizational flexibility and efficiency is becoming much less palatable for a huge swath of companies all at once. As more continue to flee the lock in and corresponding costs of the cloud out of pure fiscal necessity, the tools to make this “un-bundling” movement even easier and more practical will continue to be improved upon. With that in mind, we can scarcely imagine how the ecosystem of independent bare metal providers and portable infrastructure tooling might look like 10 years from now, or how they might have looked like today had there not been more than 10 years of artificially low interest rates to begin with. “The Cloud” as we know it today, may never have come to be. Indeed, the fact that it did evolve in the way it did increasingly seems like the anomaly. A development that was broadly accepted but is in fact seeming more counterintuitive in hindsight by the day. In it’s stead, we are seeing the growth of a much more diverse, distributed, and commoditized pool of compute providers, upon which an ecosystem of open source and highly portable software can flourish.&nbsp; Unwinding The Cloud The problem with the growth of major cloud providers isn’t the idea that certain businesses shouldn’t specialize in running the hardware on behalf of other businesses with other priorities. The problem is actually that that specialization doesn’t go far enough. There should be a competitive industry for offering compute as a commodity, and distinct industries for orchestration, managed services, and tool chains to effectively utilize that compute, independent of where the physical hardware is located and who manages it. Certainly, there will always be a market for vertically integrated hardware and software products, typically thought of as hosted platforms as a service. But if we accept that the expansive proliferation of this bundled pattern was in large part driven by unsustainable incentives derived from low interest rates, then we must conclude that the relative market for these offerings is much smaller than what we’ve seen up to this point. The logical conclusion of this is a continued “un-bundling” movement, and the gradual but accelerating transformation of a more than half a trillion dollar industry. That means growth for providers of "less-strings-attached" bare metal as a service (BMaaS) and basic virtualized offerings, and vastly increased interest, attention, and development of portable software and services that can be deployed on top of any provider of compute resources. This reorientation of how we build and deploy applications will have profound effects, but ultimately will likely be a huge blow to the defacto oligopoly and over centralization of infrastructure in the hands of AWS/GCP/Azure, and a big win for industry disintermediation and competition in the long run.In the midst of ongoing economic uncertainty, we might actually be seeing the internet trending towards a more natural and distributed equilibrium as skewed incentives are removed from the markets comprising it. One thing seems certain: Were it not for artificially low interest rates to begin with, the way we would use “someone else’s computer” would look very different from the cloud we see today, and much more in line with the original vision of an open, decentralized, and interoperable internet. Practical Takeaways For developers and dev ops engineers: Instead of that next AWS certification, start familiarizing yourself more seriously with bare metal, and how to deploy and work with more fundamental building blocks. Frameworks like MRSK, Supabase, and others offer paths to effectively deploy to bare metal as well as VPSs in manageable ways. Demand for technical talent that can facilitate migrations to this paradigm will continue to grow rapidly. For companies and organizations: Are you on the cloud? If so, you’ve likely already taken a recent look at your AWS bill and are wondering how to make some improvements. It’s time to start thinking outside of the box, and ask your engineering teams to take a serious look at some of these trends and technologies mentioned in this write up and present a plan to get to higher ground. Still operating on-premise infrastructure? You might have actually dodged a bullet there, and you’re in a position to carefully plan what your future looks like. There’s plenty of options between remaining on-prem, out sourcing on-prem management, going to a BMaaS model, or some hybrid of these options. For data centers and independent compute providers: This is your time to shine. There’s never been a bigger opportunity to grow your business, but to do so you need to offer comparable user experiences and programmatic capabilities to the large cloud providers to make transitions easier for new customers, but otherwise simply focus on delivering superior hardware for the price. At Hydrahost.com, we’re building a data center directory, and helping our data center partners offer modern Bare Metal Self Service capabilities with easy to use UIs and robust API. Contact us to learn more.

In our now higher interest rate environment, the reality of cloud costs and its long term implications for organizational flexibility and efficiency is becoming much less palatable for a huge swath of companies all at once.

The Cloud: A Low Interest Rate Phenomena 

There are two types of moments in history: those that feel like nothing happens and those that feel as if the world changes multiple times over in a single lifetime. The last decades have seen the rise of mega tech platforms that promised obvious efficiencies with few downsides. These platforms changed our entire society. What was promised was more choice and freedom for all with lower prices and what we got was an assault on our core identity as a society. Today, we have a choice — what do we want our future to be? In the past decade, the single greatest accelerant of societal change was mega internet platforms. With widespread adoption and near infinite scale, big tech platforms were sold as a public good and innovation free from moral responsibilities for every consumer and business to benefit from. On the surface, things appeared harmless and basically free, like selling books or providing information. Underneath their full ownership of the core infrastructure stack for the free and open web, from domains to computing power, lurked increasing lock-in with walled gardens that grew into a power that was destined to be abused. Without a check, this type of absolute power will be corrupted.

<blockquote>“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton</blockquote>

Then, COVID changed everything and brought light to the brewing darkness that had been brewing behind the meticulously designed and crafted walled gardens. The mask was taken off, so mega-tech platforms attempted to mask the world. They executed a near autocrat-level control over global society at once. Convenience and subsidized lock-in with “free services” turned into a society-wide hostage situation. The wolf was in the hen house. With scale, came brutal centralized control that threatens every citizen and business. With COVID, quiet conversations about censorship that only impact the fringe and politically involved now reached the mainstream. What previously impacted the 1% now suddenly impacted the other 99%. The world was in shock at the speed and intensity of this change. Business owners were thrown into jail for normal operations. Dissent led to mob-like censorship the likes infamous dictators would have been in awe of and public witch burning to unperson the heterodox made a massive comeback. People were literally arrested for surfing in the ocean and walking down the street without a cloth mask on. I was a victim of the thumb of mega tech platforms. I&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/controlling-the-virus-narrative-11584899715" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote a piece in March of 2020</a>&nbsp;that was the first seminal criticism of lockdowns and COVID hysteria. It garnered millions and millions of views in less than 24 hours. My core argument warned that our politicians were taking things way too far and the evidence did not justify the rash and immoral dilution of basic freedoms. Then, I suffered a fate like many others —&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lockdown-skeptic-they-couldnt-silence-11589566245" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">I was canceled</a>. My predictions and assessments were accurate, yet my access to the internet was revoked. I was deemed a thought criminal and put into internet jail for expressing precise and well-supported views. For the length of COVID hysteria, we watched the free and open internet suffocate under the weight of mega tech platforms. These platforms were founded to achieve scale but did so with a cornerstone of lock-in and centralization. These values prohibited the abilities of companies and people to freely operate and utilize the open web when it mattered the most. We asked for the promise of a free and open internet. Instead, we got an elimination of customer choice and mega tech profiting from lock-in by bundling sub-par products and abusing power without a second thought. Despite how much society is opposed, mega tech platforms have become too big to fail. It is time to change that. The world needs a new social contract with technology companies that won’t take away power but instead enables freedom, choice, sovereignty, and dignity. The world needs a new type of infrastructure platform that follows the initial vision of a free and open web with a renewed promise to ALWAYS give you choice and privacy for whatever your needs or priorities are. This is why I started&nbsp;<a href="http://www.hydrahost.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hydra Host</a>&nbsp;with two longtime friends, Garrett and Ariel. Hydra Host is here to offer&nbsp;real&nbsp;customer choice in hosting, web infrastructure, and most importantly, compute. Infrastructure is the heartbeat of how the internet works and is fundamental to the social contract between platforms and users. Infrastructure is how every company or individual accesses the web. Without sound infrastructure, you could be cut off from your right to the web. Hydra Host is here to fix that. Let’s be real. No one really likes their hosting provider. The public cloud failed. It can’t do everything you want. Bills are confusing. In your gut, the price feels out of proportion compared to what you receive. There is constant pressure from providers to pull you further into their toolchains so you can’t leave. Their “free credits” feel like a gateway drug because you are always hearing about the better hosting provider down the road. Your infrastructure provider should not control your business or control you. <blockquote>YOU should be in charge so YOU can do choose to do what is best for YOUR company and YOU should never be concerned about your cloud infrastructure provider deciding your company can’t do business.</blockquote> From Hydra Host’s founding moment, we have followed the best security and privacy practices and adopted cutting-edge agnosticism and open-source frameworks.&nbsp;Our vision is for any user to have the ability to access any infrastructure provider in the world, whether for cost or security reasons, with a single API.&nbsp;At any time, you can decide to leave any provider or try a new provider. No refactoring. No complexity. Freedom to choose, freedom to move as easy as a click. The choice is yours. Just like with Kayak or any other marketplace, you are in the driver’s seat. Hydra Host has standardized and simplified every point of the provisioning process. Each hosting company is a common and uniform node that you can access in a simple and single programmatic framework. With our API, we prevent you from getting locked in ever again. Our commitment with Hydra Host is to constantly deliver the best hosting possible while respecting our customer's and client’s privacy. We believe the internet should be accessible to every single person and company regardless of background, creed, faith, or tradition. You can test our initial Terraform provider API for yourself —&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/Hydra-Host/terraform-provider-hydra" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://github.com/Hydra-Host/terraform-provider-hydra</a> As&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/get_hydrahost/status/1501280353838792706?s=20&amp;t=DLKQggKEfJyXdRyLpU8t3g" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">we allow mega tech companies to control more and abuse their power</a>, our ability to see what humanity can truly do is limited. We are choking humanity’s greatest asset for survival — creativity. The future is too important to let a handful of mega-tech companies determine what we’re allowed to do. It is harder than ever to see where the future could take us. At Hydra Host, we’re paving the way and working to ensure your right to the free and open web doesn’t ride or die on the whims of a random tech platform. With Hydra Host, we believe your future should be in your own hands. <a href="https://www.hydrahost.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Join us</a>. Choose liberty and not tech tyranny. The time is now to storm centralized infrastructure and seize the future we want, for the people and the free and open web.

<blockquote>“A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.” — V for Vendetta</blockquote>

“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.” — Guy Fawkes

The dangerous remedy to the desperate disease of cloud hosting

In software, everyone wants to be in on the Next Big Thing™. Of course, identifying that Thing can be tricky. Today, Hydra is doing that work for you. In this primer we’ll cover: <ul><li>What is Sky Computing, and why it’s quickly emerging as the Next Big Thing</li><li>Sky Computing use cases, and how it compliments other trends such as AI/ML</li><li>How it works, the different implementation approaches, and their trade-offs</li><li>How industry adoption is likely to play out</li><li>The early companies and projects, like Hydra Host, poised to be early major players</li></ul> Whether you’re a software developer, platform/DevOps engineer, or a business owner, if you rely on the cloud and want to keep a competitive edge, being early to the Sky Computing discussion is a must. The goal of this article is to provide a high-level primer on this subject and its ongoing emergence, with actionable starting points on how to get in on the ground floor to the benefit of your career, business, and customers. <h2>What even is this Thing</h2> “Sky Computing” registers under 1,000 monthly searches on Google, so what is it, and why are we certain it’s not just a Thing, but poised to be a Big Thing? The term was cemented relatively recently in a paper titled <a href="https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2205/2205.07147.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">“The Sky Above the Clouds: A Berkley View on the Future of Cloud Computing” by Ion Stoica and company</a>, and is meant to evoke a radical extension and enhancement of today’s cloud computing landscape. As the name suggests, the central idea of Sky Computing is users should be able to leverage all different clouds and other resource providers, whether major hyperscalers, independent datacenters, or edge compute, as easily as they’re able to leverage a single cloud provider. Rather than being reliant on any single cloud, the entire skyscape of computing should be at all of our fingertips. It’s worth noting that there are competing terms being used to describe the same ideas, including <a href="https://siliconangle.com/2022/05/21/supercloud-becoming-thing/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">“Supercloud” and even “Metacloud”</a>. None have a clear edge yet, but Sky Computing has the benefit of being a completely novel term without any of the potential baggage of previous associations. The “Sky Above The Clouds” paper also does the best job of comprehensively describing the technology and challenges so far. <h2>The Problem</h2> Cloud was a pivotal step forward for the software industry. The cloud allowed a natural division between two compute spaces - the building and maintaining of applications and the operating hardware required to host them. However, the cloud as it works today also has significant down-sides. Today, all the major clouds have one anti-feature in common: cloud vendor lock in. Once you’ve built your entire infrastructure to a particular provider, shifting to another one entirely is typically a complicated and expensive undertaking. As a result, what we have today are different isolated “clouds”, or walled gardens with little agility and optionality for businesses. On the macro scale, this reduces competition and increases pricing. On the micro scale, this means the norm is to be forced to entirely rely on a single hosting operator for business operations, continuity, and their ongoing fair pricing and policies. <h2>Multi-Cloud is a Cry for Help</h2> Businesses already intuitively understand the criticality of the issues associated with being stuck with a single provider and are working to imperfectly address them. <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/virtana-research-finds-more-than-80-of-enterprises-have-a-multi-cloud-strategy-and-78-are-using-more-than-three-public-clouds-301548266.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">In a recent survey, more than 80% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy and 78% are already using more than 3 public clouds.</a> The factors pushing these enterprises towards leveraging new providers stretch from cost optimization, to available geographic locations, and to the need for diversification in the event of a provider outage. However, in Hydra’s experience of offering multi-cloud advisory and consultation services, most businesses are multi-cloud in the sense that they leverage other providers to deploy new services, rather than making legacy services cloud agnostic and multi-cloud capable. This is because migrating legacy infrastructure built to a specific cloud remains so difficult. Managing disparate resources across providers creates its own problems however, due to the burden of orchestrating and maintaining multiple different cloud infrastructure stacks and accounts which sport their own distinct tool chains and interfaces. There’s a better way, and that’s exactly what Sky Computing aims to achieve. <h2>The Next Big Thing</h2> Imagine a single dashboard that allows you to click and choose which provider you deploy your resources to, filterable by variables such as prices, locations, latency estimates, historical uptime, performance, compliance standards, and legal jurisdictions. You can deploy any of your services and applications independently to whichever provider is a superior fit for the needs of that particular component, while also redeploying them as often as there is new favorable options to take advantage of. Substituting this dashboard with an API or Terraform provider enables the same capabilities programatically, allowing you to build pipelines which can deploy and redeploy services to different providers automatically depending on stated preferences. One obvious use case for these capabilities is the ability to shop around for the best deal on compute intensive operations, such as model training for machine learning. Whenever you’re ready to begin a new job training a model from a large data set, you can do an active search of the least expensive (or most performant) hardware available on the market to leverage. Another use case is the ability to compare and choose between all resources available that meet required jurisdictional or compliance guidelines, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO. Yet another can be optimizing for uptime, by spreading clusters of the same critical service across multiple different providers as an active risk management strategy. <h2>How It Works</h2> The key component required for unlocking this experience and the subsequent use cases is described by the Sky Above the Clouds authors as a “intercloud brokerage”, or what Hydra Host originally conceived as an “arbitrage layer.” These brokers serve as a middleware layer and API gateway for each cloud provider, providing a unified and standardized interface for leveraging all of their resources. They do the work of integrating and maintaining the interfaces of the various cloud providers, so you can focus on your application level services. Several projects are already pursuing differing visions of this broker-like model today, Hydra Host included. Differing approaches exist with different sets of tradeoffs. The largest distinction to be made in categorizing them so far is what we call either the maximalist approach or the minimalist approach (what the Sky Above the Clouds refers to as a “shim layer”). <h2>Maximalist vs Minimalist</h2> The goal of the maximalist cloud broker approach is to piece together and standardize the interfaces for the various product catalogues of the major cloud service providers. This can include high level services such as EKS, RDS, data analytics tools, and more. The advantage here is the significant demand and use cases for combining the best services from all providers, say RDS from AWS and data analytic tools from GCP, as they are widely used. Given the sheer number of services that cloud providers now provide, and the inherent complexity of higher-level services, there is a disadvantage. Building and maintaining an ever-growing list of products across clouds becomes tricky to scale and maintain even for a company dedicated to the function. On the other hand, the goal of the minimalist approach is to conversely bridge only the lowest levels of cloud and hosting resources together, such as compute, storage, and networking. Once bridged, a protocol like standard is provided on top so higher-level services can be rebuilt on to a common interface. This interface is natively cloud agnostic, meaning applications built on top of it are able to run uniformly in all hosting environments without changes. The advantage to the minimalist approach is that integrations with different providers are far simpler to build and maintain than the maximalist approach. There are fewer moving targets and less complexity. Like any good protocol, this approach makes the “broker” strategy much simpler to understand and lightweight to run. Additionally, it is easier to quickly integrate hosting providers. This expands possibilities far beyond the major cloud providers, including the large landscape of independent data centers and rapidly growing number of edge compute locations. Furthermore, this approach forces providers to compete on the commodity level that is the hardware, increasing competition where it can have the biggest daily impact: your wallet. The downside of the minimalist approach is development complexity. Development shifts from integration work to redeveloping the infrastructure stack, meaning that the platform won’t be ideal right away for every application if they are heavily reliant on higher level cloud services like EKS. This will be overcome through time as the infrastructure stack matures and offers effective analogues to common high level cloud services. <h2>Adoption Roadmap</h2> So, what will the rollout of Sky Computing look like? Right now, adoption is nascent, which provides more upside for the innovators and early adopters. Ultimately, the adoption path will be influenced by one major factor: friction. While cloud brokers make it easy to deploy applications to multiple clouds by offering a unified interface, migrating off cloud interfaces to sky brokers takes the same type of work that makes cloud migration a pain to begin with. This means that similar to current multi-cloud trends, most early adoption of the intercloud broker model will come from new services and applications. Emerging startups and SMBs are uniquely positioned to leverage this technology, as they are relatively unencumbered by sprawling legacy applications. However, another group that that is well positioned to be early adopters includes large enterprises who are already facing the need to undergo infrastructure migrations. Perhaps this is due to recent M&amp;A or simply an effort to dramatically cut costs. For comparable effort, these enterprises can migrate to a Sky Computing model to solve their dilemma and never have to worry about extensive hosting migration pains ever again. <h2>Getting Involved</h2> It’s not often that you’re able to get in on the ground floor of a powerful new paradigm, but here we are. There are multiple “broker” providers to explore which we’ve outlined here (non-exhaustively, we’re sure), and given the early stages all are easy to reach out to. We, of course, encourage you to read the original <a href="https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2205/2205.07147.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">"The Sky Above the Clouds"</a> paper, and other links in this article. Here at Hydra Host we’re working on launching a State of the Sky newsletter you can subscribe to if interested, as well as a community chat which we’ll keep subscribers alerted to. Sky Computing is poised to effectively address rampant pain points in today’s cloud computing landscape and change the entire cost benefit equation distributed computing. Together, we can build a community of early practitioners that can accelerate this change and provide outsized benefits for early adopters. <h2>Inter-Cloud Brokers:</h2> <ul><li>Hydra Host: We’ve been researching and experimenting with various approaches to the “arbitrage/broker” function since April 2021, settling on a Minimalist strategy. We’re working with early adopters to onboard them on to our fully managed platform, with plans to open source our software in the second half of 2023. 2023 roadmap goes beyond public clouds, and integrating independent bare metal value providers. Make sure to contact us for a demo or if interested in our future newsletter, and keep an eye on our blog!</li><li><a href="https://controlplane.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Controlplane</a>: Founded in 2019, it allows user to mix and match cloud services from the big 3 (AWS, GCP, Azure) in the vein of our described “Maximalist” Sky strategy.&nbsp;</li><li><a href="https://www.upbound.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Upbound</a>: Founded in 2017, Unbound is building a universal cloud platform powered by their crossplane framework, which can be self hosted to help manage a variety of service providers.&nbsp;</li><li><a href="https://www.anyscale.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Anyscale</a>: Founded in 2019, Anyscale is a platform to run “Ray” based AI/ML workloads on top of any cloud. From the outside they seem to employ a more minimalist strategy to ensure workloads are inherently more portable, and is focused entirely on the hosted Ray use case, for now.</li></ul> We’ll be expanding this list on an ongoing basis as we see more players in the inter-cloud broker space continue to appear. If we missed anyone, let us know!

In software, everyone wants to be in on the Next Big Thing. Of course, identifying that Thing can be tricky. Today, Hydra is doing that work for you.

Our Articles

The Cloud: A Low Interest Rate Phenomena

The dangerous remedy to the desperate disease of cloud hosting

Beyond the Cloud: Get Ahead on Sky Computing