If marketing buzzwords hold any truth, then it’s clear the industry has embraced that the enterprise, for the most part, is hybrid, writes Lori MacVittie, F5 Distinguished Engineer at the cloud services company.
“Hybrid” is a multi-faceted term, much like “cloud” and “edge” and even “AI”. However, we generally use “hybrid” to describe “something composed of two different components”. Or, the term ‘heterogeneous’ could be substituted for ‘hybrid’, and it would convey nearly the same idea. With this notion, a hybrid application portfolio means that the collection of applications managed by an organisation spans both modern (mobile, microservices) and traditional (client-server, monoliths, three-tier web) application types. This same terminology applies to other enterprise aspects, including architectures, operations, and the environments in which organisations select for deploying and running applications.
So why is recognising hybrid structures important? Because hybrid systems come with unique challenges that don’t arise when you’re just developing, deploying, operating, or securing a single “thing”. The impact of heterogeneity means different teams, tools, practices, and processes are required. And that, is where complexity originates from.
This is exactly the state of the typical enterprise: overwhelmed by the complexity of being hybrid while recognising that being hybrid is a given for the foreseeable future. When the typical enterprise is viewed through this lens, it’s evident that organisations are steadfastly and unmistakenly hybrid, regardless of the aspect being considered.
From application portfolios to architectures, from operational models to environments, every enterprise is grappling with the challenges of at least one kind of heterogeneity – and often, more. Hybrid impacts every facet of an enterprise, from strategy to execution. It drives interest in technologies and trends that are fundamentally aimed at remediating the complexity that arises from managing heterogeneous infrastructure, applications, and operations.
Respondents to F5’s 2024 State of Application Strategy survey – who indicated they had multiple components of a single application running across multiple clouds – were notably more enthusiastic about technologies such as GraphQL, microservices networking, and large language models (LLMs). Additionally, these respondents were also more drawn to multi-cloud networking, IT centralisation, and supercloud – all of which are trends which focus on tackling the complexity of connecting, securing, and managing the modern distributed enterprise.
Complexity of tools and APIs remains an almost universal challenge – with 94% of respondents this year citing it as their most frustrating issue with multi-cloud. Yet, complexity from heterogeneity appears in other areas as well; over half (52pc) of respondents identified tooling complexity as a significant barrier to automating application delivery and security. With 30 distinct application services tracked – ranging from network security to CDNs, VDI, and SSL VPNs – each one of these boosts an average deployment rate of 93 per cent. This suggests 93pc of respondents have deployed each of these 30 application services.
These services don’t always inter-operate seamlessly; in actuality, many operate in entirely separate domains with different operational and management approaches. This is the reality of hybrid: an underlying complexity that has always existed, but just exposed further by digital transformation.
There is no true escape from hybrid, barring a full commitment to a single public cloud that offers every required service for operating, delivering, and securing applications. However, this is not a widespread trend; we do not see this taking off as a trend even – particularly since only 2pc of organisations are “all in” on one public cloud, and of those, only 34% have fully committed their investments to a single cloud provider. It’s clear that those in an all-in-one-public-cloud basket are outliers. Enterprises are distributed, multi-cloud, hybrid estates. Consequently, traditional solutions must evolve to also become distributed, multi-cloud, hybrid services capable of effectively delivering, securing, and optimising every application and API, everywhere and anywhere.
