Cloud computing has been a tremendous driver of business growth over the past five years. Digital services such as Uber, AirBnB, Coursera, and Netflix have defined consumer zeitgeist while redefining entire industries in the process. This first wave of cloud fueled business growth, has largely been created by businesses leveraging cloud native applications aimed at consumer services. Traditional enterprises who seek the same agility and efficiency that the cloud provides have viewed migration of traditional enterprise applications to the cloud as a slow and complex challenge. At the same time, new cloud service providers are seeking to compete on a cost parity with large providers, and industry standard solutions that can help have been slow in arriving. The industry simply isn’t moving fast enough to address these very real customer challenges, and our customers are asking for help.
To help solve these real issues, Intel is announcing the Cloud for All Initiative with the goal of accelerating the deployment of tens of thousands of clouds over the next five years. This initiative is focused solely on cloud adoption to deliver the benefits of cloud to all of our customers. This represents an enormous efficiency and strategic transition for Enterprise IT and Cloud Service Providers. The key to delivering the efficiency of the cloud to the enterprise is rooted in software defined infrastructure. This push for more intelligent and programmable infrastructure is something that we’ve been working on at Intel for several years. The ultimate goal of Software Defined Infrastructure is one where compute, storage and network resource pools are dynamically provisioned based on application requirements.
Cloud for All has three key objectives:
- Invest in broad industry collaborations to create enterprise ready, easy to deploy SDI solutions
- Optimize SDI stacks for high efficiency across workloads
- Align the industry towards standards and development focus to accelerate cloud deployment
Through investment, Intel will utilize our broad ecosystem relationships to ensure that a choice of SDI solutions supporting both traditional enterprise and cloud native applications are available in easy to consume options. This work will include scores of industry collaborations that ensure SDI stacks have frictionless integration into data center infrastructure.
Through optimization, Intel will work with cloud software providers to ensure that SDI stacks are delivered with rich enterprise feature sets, highly available and secure, and scalable to thousands of nodes. This work will include the full optimization of software to take advantage of Intel architecture features and technologies like Intel virtualization technology, cloud integrity technology, and platform telemetry, all to deliver optimal enterprise capabilities.
Through industry alignment, Intel will use its leadership role in industry organizations as well as our work with the broad developer community to ensure that the right standards are in place to ensure workloads have true portability across clouds. This standardization will help enterprises have the confidence to deploy a mix of traditional and cloud native applications.
This work has already started. We have been engaged in the OpenStack community for a number of years as a consumer, and more recently our integration into the Foundation board last year. We have used that user and leadership position to push for features needed in the enterprise. Our work does not stop there however, over the past few months we’ve announced collaborations with cloud software leaders including CoreOS, Docker and Red Hat highlighting enterprise readiness for OpenStack and container solutions. We’ve joined with other industry leaders to form the Open Container Initiative and Cloud Native Computing Foundation to drive the industry standards and frameworks for cloud native applications.
Today, we’ve announced our next step in Cloud for All with a strategic collaboration with Rackspace, the co-founder of OpenStack and a company with a deep history of collaboration with Intel. We’ve come together to deliver a stable, predictable, and easy to operate enterprise ready OpenStack scalable to 1000’s of nodes. This will be accomplished through the creation of the OpenStack Innovation Center. Where we will be assembling large developer teams across Intel and Rackspace to work together to address the key challenges facing the Openstack platform. Our upstream contributions will align with the priorities of the OpenStack Foundation’s Enterprise Workgroup. To facilitate this effort we will create the Hybrid Cloud Testing Cluster, a large scale environment, open to all developers in the community wishing to test their code at scale with the objective of improving the OpenStack platform. In total, we expect this collaboration to engage hundreds of new developers internally and through community engagement to address critical requirements for the OpenStack community.
Of course, we’ve only just begun. You can expect to hear dozens of announcements from us in the coming year including additional investments and collaborations, as well as the results of our optimization and delivery. I’m delighted to be able to share this journey with you as Cloud for All gains momentum. We welcome discussion on how Intel can best work with industry leaders and customers to deliver the goals of Cloud for All to the enterprise.
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