Introduction
Enterprises across the globe are embracing cloud-based hosting for their IT landscape. They are rapidly moving their applications and software to the cloud to reap the benefits of the cloud. The cloud migration journey has been there for a decade or so. It all started with a lift and shift approach where the applications running on servers hosted in the enterprise premises were moved to cloud-based virtual machines. Soon, there was a need to modernize the applications and run them as Platform-as-a-Service.
Business needs evolved as the cloud matured, and modern hosting options like Serverless and Containers paved their way to the cloud. From the business standpoint, enterprises have leveraged cloud hosting capabilities for their workload, and they have started looking at how to reap additional benefits from the cloud, maximize productivity, and bring innovation to their business. Cloud Continuum can fill in the dots here and help businesses mature to the next level by leveraging the cloud offerings from a completely different viewpoint other than just hosting of workloads.
In this article, we will discuss the cloud continuum and how enterprises can leverage this idea to innovate their business.
What is Cloud Continuum?
The concept of Cloud Continuum is very much like the concept of Enterprise Continuum used by Enterprise Architects to design their Enterprise systems and landscape. Enterprise Continuum is coined in the TOGAF standards and widely followed across. The Enterprise Continuum is all about classifying and organizing different assets like policies, standards, strategic initiatives, and many more. These assets are developed as abstract and generic in the beginning and mature in their journey to become more concrete and specific from the enterprise standpoint, catering to specific business needs. These assets, often called Architecture Building Blocks, can be used together in combination to build an Enterprise Architecture or blueprint.
Similar to the Enterprise Continuum, Cloud Continuum is the story of bringing different cloud technologies together to build a very new enterprise cloud topology that can encompass everything on its way from on-premises to the public cloud. You will use all available on-premises servers, edge computing servers, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud all at once to generate maximum value for the cloud-based enterprises. You end up controlling the entire continuum of infrastructure and data right from the on-premises server and the edge servers to the public cloud, all in a single control plane. The enterprise data flows and is being processed across distributed nodes. The following figure demonstrates the concept of Cloud Continuum.
![Cloud Continuum]()
Figure. Cloud Continuum
Cloud Continuum can be implemented using cloud-based technologies, the Internet of Things, and robust and fast networks like 5G. Internet of Things devices can facilitate data transfers between on-premises and edge servers to the cloud. 5G network will enable high speed data transfers between various constituents of the continuum like on-premises, edge servers, private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud and multi cloud.
Cloud Continuum Use case
Let us try to understand Cloud Continuum with an example. Cloud Continuum can be leveraged to build a modern inventory management system for a retail enterprise. The enterprise keeps the inventory on the rack shelf. The sensors in the rack shelf keep monitoring the number of items in the rack for each of the item types the enterprise is selling. The sensor also captures data for the items that are due to expire soon. The sensor in the racks ingests all these data to the on-premises server. Edge Servers access these data from the on-premises server and evaluate for inventory shortage and if there is a need to replenish the inventory. The Edge servers send requests for replenishment of the items to an API application service running on the private cloud. The API service checks for the vendor for the item and notifies the vendor in the vendor’s software system hosted on multiple clouds. Some vendors have their applications on AWS, some on Azure, and a few on GCP. The vendor processes the request and delivers the items to the retail enterprise. The inventory manager refills the rack and uses an IoT device to scan the item codes and send them to its database hosted on public cloud from where the sales system can leverage the availability of the items. The entire ecosystem runs without any network lag and works on a real time basis by leveraging 5G network. All these servers and cloud services are monitored, managed, and controlled using a single continuum plane.
Conclusion
Enterprises are already on the journey of adopting cloud technologies. Most of them have reaped the benefits of moving their workloads from on-premises to the cloud. They are highly mature in terms of cloud adoption. So, the next set of benefits they can get from cloud adoption is by embracing the cloud continuum. They can automate and integrate their enterprises right from on-premises all the way across edge servers, private cloud, multi-cloud, and public cloud and control the continuum from a single pane.