Platform Independence: Multi-Cloud and Polyglot Cloud Deployment

The rate of cloud computing adoption in recent years has been dramatic and continues to accelerate. As recently as 2011, the message delivered by CEOs and corporate leadership worldwide was clear: “Our data will never reside in the public cloud.” The message today is equally clear: “We have a cloud-first strategy. All new applications are being deployed in the cloud. Existing applications will be migrating to the cloud. But understand, we have a multi-cloud strategy.”

This 180-degree turn at global scale in the span of a few years is remarkable. But while corporate leaders are eagerly embracing the cloud, they are also very concerned about cloud vendor lock-in. They want to be able to continually negotiate. They want to deploy different applications in clouds from different vendors, and they want to be free to move applications from one cloud vendor to another.

Multi-cloud deployment is therefore an additional requirement of a modern model-driven software platform that is fully supported by the C3 AI Platform. Applications developed with the C3 AI Platform can run without modification on any cloud and on bare metal behind the firewall in a hybrid cloud environment.

A final requirement for the new AI technology stack – that the C3 AI Platform fully delivers – is polyglot cloud deployment capability: the ability to mix various services from multiple cloud providers and to easily swap and replace those services. The cloud vendors provide the market a great service by enabling instant access to virtually unlimited horizontally scalable computing capacity and effectively infinite storage capacity at exceptionally low cost. As the cloud vendors aggressively compete with one another on price, the cost of cloud computing and storage is approaching zero.

A second important service cloud vendors provide is rapid innovation of microservices. Microservices like TensorFlow from Google accelerate machine learning. Amazon Forecast facilitates deep learning for time-series data. Azure Stream Analytics integrates with Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Suite to enable powerful real-time analytics of IoT sensor data. It seems not a week goes by without another announcement of yet another useful microservice from Azure, AWS, Google, and IBM.