What Colocation Users Should Know About AWS’s and Its Rivals’ Hybrid Cloud Solutions AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM all take different approaches to extending their clouds to customers’ own data centers. Once upon a time, the major public cloud providers mostly ignored colocation users. There wasn’t an AWS hybrid cloud solution, or an Azure one. If you wanted to integrate public cloud services with workloads hosted on your own servers inside a colocation data center, you were left to figure out how to do that on your own, using third-party solutions. That has changed drastically over the past several years thanks to the rollout of new hybrid cloud platforms that make it much easier to connect public cloud services to colocated infrastructure. Exactly how the platforms do that, however, and which features they offer, vary significantly from one public cloud to the next.