Recently, Phil Wainewrite took Microsoft to task with respect to their advocacy of hybrid clouds ... meaning that he thought they were being self-serving by maintaining that the enterprise required on-premise software as well as infrastructure, platform and applications "in the cloud." In this piece, however, he modifies the definitions so as to recognize a hybrid solution that makes sense.
Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge
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What we’re looking at here, then, is a local unit that supplements a cloud service in the interests of a better user experience and more economic resource usage. It’s a pragmatic response to the reality of having a large number of users at a single site, in which case you may as well extend the cloud to the site. It’s the same principle as implementing Gears to offload part of an application’s processing load to local clients (or, more ambitiously, Google’s experiments with its Native Client). Why not move that part of the cloud service closer to the client if it makes the service faster and more scalable? So long as it’s an optional feature rather than a requirement, it’s fully consistent with a cloud philosophy. ...
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