Supercloud is becoming a thing

Originally published on May 21, 2022
Last year we noted in a Breaking Analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the notion of multicloud. We’ve said for years that multicloud is really not a strategy but rather a symptom of multivendor. We used the term supercloud to describe an abstraction layer that resides above and across hyperscale infrastructure, connects on premises workloads and eventually stretches to the edge. Our premise is that supercloud goes beyond running services in native mode on each individual cloud. Rather supercloud hides the underlying primitives and APIs of the respective cloud vendors and creates a new connection layer across locations. 

Since our initial post, we’ve found many examples within the ecosystem of technology companies working on so-called supercloud in various forms. Including some examples that actually do not try to hide cloud primitives but rather are focused on creating a consistent experience for developers across the devsecops tool chain, while preserving access to low level cloud services. 

In this Breaking Analysis we share some recent examples of supercloud that we’ve uncovered. We also tap theCUBE network to access direct quotes about supercloud from the many CUBE guests we’ve recently had on the program. Here we test the concept’s technical and business feasibility. We’ll also post some recent ETR data to put into context some of the players we think are going after this opportunity and where they’re at in their supercloud buildout.