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When the demands of a cloud-dependent company exceed the capacity of a single cloud, several cloud providers may be required. The arrival of Cloud 1.0 introduced lower IT costs and on-demand service availability. However, it is fair to say that the globalisation of cloud services has not been without its fair share of difficulties. To lessen the challenges and reduce cost, Joint Cloud can be the way forward. Lets see what exactly it is and how organizations can absorb the benefits offered by this technology.

Cloud technology behemoths have begun to collaborate in order to expedite the go-to-market cycle and capitalize on each others unique selling points. Its a partnership between cloud service providers that will help joint clients with their migration capabilities and application operations across various cloud platforms. Competitors Oracle and Microsoft recently formed a partnership that combines their strengths and provides the best of both worlds. Similarly, tech company Avaya recently announced a collaboration with Microsoft to develop a joint cloud communication solution.

Joint Cloud is a modern computing platform that encourages developers to design cross-cloud services through software-defined interaction and cooperation across different cloud service organizations. Furthermore, container platform automation capabilities handle multi-cloud access, providing enterprises with a compelling solution to work with various cloud providers, infrastructure, and cloud types.

Aron Brand, the CTO of CTERA, explained this new age phenomenon as a new generation of computing model which facilitates providing cross-cloud services through integration and cooperation among different cloud providers. While this term is currently used mostly by academia, some of the required components of joint cloud computing already exist in the commercial sector, said Brand.

Take for example the concept of a global file system, which creates a single namespace, globally accessible file system, overlayed on multiple object storage providers which can be located in different clouds, regions and operated by different service entities. A global file system eliminates vendor lock-in by allowing transparent data movement across cloud providers; enables boundless storage capacity, while providing comprehensive control over and visibility into this global distributed data. Using the global file system as a foundation, service organizations can develop federated applications that span heterogeneous clouds and data centers, including edge devices, he added.

From our point of view Joint Cloud Computing is an extension of what we would call a multi-cloud strategy, commented Sathya Sankaran, COO of Catalogic Software. The current discussion around joint cloud computing/multi-cloud is all about building infrastructure that makes it easier to communicate between applications running on different clouds, migrate loads (data and applications) between various clouds, and manage loads in various clouds, he said.

See More: AI Summit Silicon Valley 2021: Top Highlights & Insights from AI Experts

Even though its a decade-old phenomenon, the year 2021 has further accelerated the growth of Joint Cloud computing, helping it become one of the most trending cloud computing technologies of the year. Lets look at some of the recent developments in this space.

Thales and Google Cloud have partnered up to establish Joint Cloud offering in France together

Thales and Google Cloud collaborated in October to co-develop a French hyperscale cloud product. With this new service, French businesses and government agencies will have access to all of the capacity, security, agility, and autonomy that the two entities respective technologies have to offer.

Google Cloud and Genesys expand their Joint Cloud Contact Center

The two companies recently announced their partnership on new AI, deep learning, and data analytics applications. They have a number of objectives in mind. Automating customer service, providing predicted customer satisfaction, and AI-driven verification are just a few examples. Besides, the plans include creating new conversational routes that use Google Search, Maps, and other tools.

Woori Financial modified Joint Cloud platform to speed up their digital transformation

The joint cloud infrastructure has supposedly assisted in advancing the companys digital innovation since its deployment in February. It optimally manages the groups IT assets and cloud space, enhancing the divisions synergy in digital-based companies.

At times, cloud-dependent organizations require more than just one cloud provider as the needs surpass the capacity of a single cloud. We see events like Black Friday that demand tens of thousands of times more resources than normal days, straining a solitary cloud vendor, which is either unable to provide the requested resources or must provide IT resources based on access demand. This might result in higher costs and lower IT resource use, which contradicts cloud computings primary purpose of increasing IT resource utilization.

The advent of Cloud 1.0 has enabled reduced IT costs and on-demand availability of services. But, it wont be wrong to state that there have also been certain challenges with the globalization of cloud services. In a research conducted by IEEE on JointCloud, a few challenges associated with Cloud 1.0 were identified. These were:

See More: Top Security Considerations for Transitioning from Private to Public Cloud

Both academia and industry have begun to examine partnerships amongst independent public cloud providers to overcome these difficulties. Cloud 2.0s core element is cooperative cloud computing, which removes the barrier between numerous clouds. Lets look at some of the benefits that make Joint Cloud a perfect fit for organizations.

With the increasing expansion of data buffers and the heterogeneity of customer tastes, one cloud provider can scarcely meet all of their needs. Joint Cloud is an effective way to coordinate autonomous cloud peers to deliver a high-level of storage service. However, the storage services must strike global balances between accuracy and consistency under various conditions and needs by exploiting resources that are scattered across diverse cloud peers.

Paul Repice, VP of sales, Datadobi said, Gone are the days where enterprises rely on one single storage vendor for their data. Today, 92% of organizations either have a multi-cloud strategy in place or are moving in that direction, and over 80% of large enterprises have already adopted a hybrid cloud infrastructure. These trends make sense because the pandemic encouraged global enterprise companies to adopt effective, proven cloud technologies offered by market-leading brands due to the lack of need for sudden infrastructure spending. The availability of cloud-based file storage offered a cost-effective, quick fix and an apparent win-win for businesses under pressure to adapt on the fly.

To make the change back to the office smoother, organizations must work with vendor-neutral solutions that can handle the scale and complexity of large storage environments in 2022. When evaluating a particular vendor, IT teams need to check the compatibility with hyperscalers, preserve data integrity throughout any data management projects, and make sure that the vendors offer access to a comprehensive support team. With these building blocks in place, organizations can make the best use of cloud and on-premises storage in the long term.

Joint Cloud computing is a new research project spearheaded by Chinese institutes to address the computing challenges associated with various clouds. Customers diversified and changing cloud resource needs are fulfilled by Joint Cloud through delivering virtual cloud resources (VC). The Joint Cloud users may use an internet browser to write, debug, and execute activities in their work environment without worrying about minimal issues like framework deployment, setup, and parameterization. This working environment is based on a customized VC that offers the most appropriate resources from the underlying clouds. This architecture might smoothly traverse different clouds, allowing apps to elastically scale out and utilize fresh resources from third parties to deal with load demand issues.

Over the last several years, there has been a tremendous surge in corporate investment and expanding research interest in the Internet of Things. The synergy between traditional cloud and edge cloud is already underway to give quality service to varied consumers, spurred by the application demand from the Internet of Everything in the future. However, because of the high marginal operating and maintenance expenses, traditional clouds must continue to collaborate. JointCloud computing is a new computing paradigm that supports collaboration within heterogeneous clouds. JointCloud intends to make it easier for many cloud vendors to work together to deliver effective cross-cloud services. Also, it is cost-effective because it focuses on vertical cloud resource integration and horizontal cloud vendor collaboration.

The first edition of cloud computing (Cloud 1.0) is gradually being phased out in favor of the second (Cloud 2.0). The novel JointCloud efforts, which were lately financially backed by Chinas Ministry of Science and Technology as part of the National Key Program for Cloud Computing and Big Data, is the latest generation of computing paradigm for Cloud 2.0 that enables businesses to customize cross-cloud services.

JointCloud aspires to bring together key cloud providers in China and those from across the world to create a joint cloud network. Unlike previous Cloud 2.0 projects such as SuperCloud and InterCloud, JointCloud is the initial stride toward creating an expanding community where all cloud providers may utilize the specified service infrastructure to deliver deep cooperation, and customers can design services above the virtualized cloud.

There are plenty of opportunities for vendors to help multi-cloud customers, but we dont see the big managed cloud providers doing much to help customers, other than enabling their management consoles to manage infrastructure in other clouds (thus putting their management tools on top), says Sankaran from Catalogic Software.

We do note that its in their interest to keep customers locked in rather than have their services totally commoditized. We dont see enthusiasm for a push on standards and tools for joint cloud computing. Although thats not to say that some industry standards couldnt eventually help here. We think Kubernetes and containerized workloads will also help to some extent, because it provides somewhat of a standard platform layer.

Do you think Joint Cloud computing will become commonplace in the coming years? Let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Wed love to hear from you!

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Joint Cloud Computing: How Can Organizations Benefit From This New Trend? - Toolbox

There was a time when supercomputers were available only to a handful of organizations, mostly governments, public research facilities and scientific bodies. The rise of cloud computing and the widespread availability of sophisticated cloud workload management (CWM) tools have reduced the barrier of entry considerably.

Only last week, YellowDog, a CWM specialist based in Bristol, United Kingdom, assembled a virtual supercomputer using its proprietary platform - and at its peak, which lasted about 10 minutes, the system had mustered an army of more than 3.2 million vCPUs.

While it was nowhere as powerful as Fugaku, that was enough to propel it into the top 10 of the world's fastest supercomputers, at least for a few minutes.

(PSA: by the way, we are going to update our Black Friday web hosting deals and Black Friday website builder deals page at least once per day till Cyber Monday)

The provisioning, which was done on behalf of a pharmaceutical company, helped run a popular drug discovery application as a single cluster. Back of the envelope calculation puts the raw cost of the project at about $65,000.

That's accounting for 33,333 AWS 96-core c5.24xlarge instances. This is one of a number of instances used during the run (essentially similar to bare metal servers or dedicated servers) and it costs $1.6013 per hour. So that's $53,376 per hour or $57,824 to account for the entire length of the session (65 minutes in all).

"With access to this on-demand supercomputer, the researchers were able to analyze and screen 337 million compounds in 7 hours. To replicate that using their on-premises systems would have taken two months," said Colin Bridger from AWS.

What's extraordinary is that this sort of firepower is available to anybody who can afford it. And it is based on the sort of hardware that runs our cloud computing world: web hosting, website builders, cloud storage, email services among others.

CWM platforms have evolved over the years to develop algorithms and machine learning capabilities to choose the best source of compute, regardless of its origin or type.

For example, one cloud provider may have the cheapest spot compute, but the algorithm wouldn't select it if it were unavailable in the territory set by the customer, or if there weren't actually a sufficient number of servers of the required instance type available within that cloud provider. In this case another source of compute would be chosen. Clever indeed!

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One of the world's largest supercomputers lived for only 10 minutes - TechRadar

For cryptocurrency investors thinking long term, Ankr (CRYPTO:ANKR) may be one of the best crypto plays in the market right now. An emerging force in decentralized finance (DeFi), Ankr has been making some serious gains lately. In fact, ANKR is up about 40% during the past month.

Ankr has a great deal to offer investors. This blockchain network allows cloud-computing providers to offer underutilized resources to users requiring cloud infrastructure.Cloud-computing providers are rewarded in ANKR tokensas compensation.

Additionally, there are other greatbenefits users receive on the Ankr network. Let's dive into why this is a top cryptocurrency on my watch list right now.

Image source: Getty Images.

The cloud-computing world is relatively well-defined, and just a handful of large players dominate the market. With such an oligopolistic structure, pricing power resides mainly with cloud-computing providers. This is great for someone who owns Amazonstock, but not so great for companies or users requiring cloud infrastructure.

Ankr seeks to change all that. This network takes existing underutilized hardware from cloud-computing providers and rents it out. In exchange for ANKR tokens, cloud-computing companies can maximize the use of their computing power. Wastage is a big deal in every sector, and Ankr helps minimize this issue to a great extent.

The idea of maximizing underutilized assets happens to be a very eco-friendly endeavor. Of course, not all blockchains are environmentally progressive. Much has been made about how much energy Bitcoin consumes every year. (Hint: almost as much power as the entire country of Thailand.)

Ankr has found a way to create utility for end users. This blockchain network aims to do so by using what already exists, rather than adding to the energy-consumption problems plaguing this sector.

Back to the decentralized piece of the equation. Decentralization is a buzz word in crypto for a reason. By cutting into the centralized market power of a few companies controlling any one sector, blockchain projects like Ankr aim to democratize pockets of the economy (and maybe the whole economy, one day).

At a high level, these goals sound idealistic and unattainable. However, the implications of Ankr's cloud-computing potential are immense.

Most centralized cloud-computing services have a single or just a few points of failure if various central locations lose power. For decentralized cloud-computing players like Ankr, this risk is minimized. By using a decentralized network of providers, Ankr can offer network stability and relatively low-cost cloud-computing services to companies looking for decentralized options.

As demand for decentralized solutions increases, Ankr could see increased adoption drive the value of its network higher. Therefore, those banking on the value of ANKR tokens as representative of the value its ecosystem creates may consider ANKR an intriguing growth option.

After all, this is a network that's looking to find novel solutions to modern problems. There's a lot investors should like about that.

Besides the cloud-computing angle (which I think is really something), Ankr also provides unique value in how investors stake tokens. Staking refers to putting up ones tokens or locking them into a given blockchain protocol to allow validation of transactions. People who stake their tokens typically receive interest in the form of additional tokens.Accordingly, this is a passive income opportunity many crypto investors are looking to get into.

However, Ankr provides an intriguing way for investors to stake tokens while putting up much smaller capital investments to do so. How?

Ankr's StakeFi product lets investors put up as little as 0.5 Ether to earn staking rewards. Currently, 32 ETH are required to stake on Ethereum's (CRYPTO:ETH) beacon chain. This would require the equivalent of more than $125,000, at present.

The platform does this by utilizing synthetic derivatives to essentially limit the amount of initial capital investors need to put up. Similar to options in the stock market, Ankr is becoming a revolutionary force in this growing area of decentralized finance.

Sure, Ethereum is moving toward Ethereum 2.0, which is likely to streamline its staking process substantially. However, delays in the move to Ethereum 2.0 have persisted. For now, Ankr has an opportunity to expand its market share in this emerging DeFi category.

Cryptocurrency investing is inherently risky, and Ankr is no exception. This crypto network faces the same systemic risks and competitive environment as its peers.

However, Ankr is creating some real-world value with its network. The fact that companies can utilize Ankr's protocol to maximize their return on assets while providing decentralized cloud-computing services to users is impressive. Additionally, I think there's a lot to like about Ankr's DeFi potential.

The ANKR token is one that represents a blockchain with a tremendous (and growing) value right now. Accordingly, I'm watching this is token closely.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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3 Reasons to Buy Ankr - Motley Fool