DISTRIBUTED CLOUD TECHNOLOGY DEFINED AND EXPLAINED

Distributed cloud hints at the decentralized distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while still being managed and orchestrated as a unified environment. It brings the flexibility of the cloud closer to where data is being generated and applications are accessed.

Rather than a centralized public cloud region only available in certain data center locations, distributed cloud allows cloud resources to be deployed at the network edge – closer to users and devices across geographic areas including retail stores, manufacturing facilities, Telco sites or office buildings.

A number of commonly-defining aspects of distributed cloud follow.

Location Independence: Workloads can be placed in optimal locations dynamically to meet business, regulatory and latency needs rather than being locked into fixed centralized capacity.

Management: Despite distributed infrastructure, centralized cloud dashboards manage, orchestrate and monitor services across far-edge sites, metro centers and traditional regions seamlessly.

Flexibility: Mix of standardized and purpose-built infrastructure across sites allows tailoring deployments to application requirements with cloud-scale flexibility.

Development Portability: Consistent tooling and services make it easier for cloud applications and functions to portable across distributed footprints while abstracting underlying complexity.

Accessibility: Services and capacity become available locally in more locations at the edge to accelerate digital transformation across industries like retail, healthcare and communications.

Distributed cloud combines public cloud provider’s economies of scale and experience while distributing resources close to the end-users. That creates the best of both centralized and distributed worlds – elasticity with locality.

By redistributing public cloud services to where data and user density is higher, distributed cloud unlocks bandwidth and latency improvements, expands access, enables new intelligent edge applications and helps meet data residency regulations. A consistent cloud environment is delivered everywhere along the cloud continuum rather than separate infrastructures.