A hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing environment that combines public and private cloud resources. The primary benefit of this type of configuration is the ability to provide access to the services of both public and private clouds while still having their data stored in a single location.
By leveraging hybrid cloud computing, organizations can improve the operational efficiency of
IT resources, reduce costs, and increase utilization, resulting in greater business agility.
A hybrid cloud architecture combines multiple environments across geographically distributed public cloud(s), private cloud(s), and on-premises infrastructure as a single-managed IT infrastructure. Existing technology resources are utilized to create an end-to-end platform for development, testing, and deployment in a hybrid cloud.
With hybrid cloud, businesses can leverage the benefits of cloud computing while maintaining a standardized infrastructure. This means it is easier to move workloads between public and private clouds as the costs and computing needs of organizations change.
Traditional hybrid cloud architecture
Traditional hybrid cloud architecture focuses on transforming a company’s on-premises data center into private cloud infrastructure and then connecting that infrastructure to public cloud environments. A cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Services, IBM Cloud, or Microsoft Azure hosts the public cloud environment. The transformation was done by utilizing a pre-built hybrid cloud system like Red Hat OpenStack.
Figure 1 Hybrid Cloud
Modern hybrid cloud architecture
Modern hybrid cloud architecture is focused less on physical connectivity. It is more concerned with facilitating workload portability across all cloud environments and automating the deployment of workloads for a given business objective.
Today, organizations are building new applications and modernizing their legacy applications to leverage cloud-native technologies—technologies that enable consistent, reliable development, deployment, management, and performance across multiple cloud environments.
The modern hybrid cloud micro-services-based architecture is at the core of the hybrid cloud model. Micro-services are smaller independently deployable application components that work together as a system.
Micro-services have their technology stack and are installed in containers, which are small executables that include the micro-service and any libraries that it depends on.
Containers share the same operating system (OS) kernel of the machine hence they are lightweight and contain the micro-services and their dependencies. With the use of virtualization, micro-services can be independently deployed on any on-premises or cloud environment.
Thanks to containerization, hybrid clouds have become accessible to all companies. The benefits include easy portability of applications and automatic deployment, allowing organizations to be highly flexible when deploying applications across different environments, such as on-premises and in the cloud.
Many aspects are considered while designing and implementing a hybrid cloud architecture. Key considerations include the organization’s business goals, its current technical environment, the aims of its digital transformation, and security concerns. Here are some factors to consider while creating the hybrid cloud strategy.
Shifting towards hybrid cloud follows two strategies- modernization or migrating from of-premises to the cloud and there are a few ways to execute this:
Lift and shift: Migrate complete applications without significant changes from off-premises to the public cloud.
Improve and move: Refactor and modernize an existing application first, then move to the public cloud environment.
Redesign: Sometimes modernizing an app is not cost-effective or possible; it needs to be rewritten entirely.
A unified control plane provides a consistent cloud operations experience across cloud environments. A unified control plan must support cloud management capabilities like CI/CD pipelines (continuous integration and deployment), workload scheduling, logging, and security.
A hybrid cloud requires a multi-tiered approach to ensure end-to-end security and protection.
Major CSPs (cloud service providers) like IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) ensure cloud security by following the SLAs (service level agreements). Some of the security services CSPs offer to include – denial of service (DOS) protection and adherence to privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
A hypervisor is the software coordinator layer between virtual machines and underlying hardware or the host operating system. The hypervisor provides an interface to the physical environment To ensure that each virtual machine has access to physical resources.
The idea of micro-segmentation is used to create and demarcate security levels amongst services running within an environment. Micro-segmentation is done by splitting the environment into various logical security segments and defining access control policies for each service and workload.
A hybrid cloud offers Scalability.
Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery are essential parts of any infrastructure. Organizations that fail to plan for these scenarios are putting themselves at risk for downtime and affecting their bottom line. With a hybrid cloud solution, a third-party cloud service provider handles organizations’ disaster recovery needs seamlessly. Cloud snapshots are used to resume service in the event of application interruption or data loss – without any loss of information across multiple locations.
A hybrid cloud offers Flexibility.
Today, the cloud environment helps an organization adapt to a changing business environment. When needs rapidly change – for example during the holiday shopping season or a successful product release – an organization can ‘cloudburst’ from the private cloud into a public cloud provider to support an increased workload for customer-facing and business-critical applications.
A hybrid cloud supports Seamless migration.
The hybrid cloud architecture provides a best-of-both-worlds solution where organizations can avoid the risks and costs of holding on to their data that may not be able to be migrated over to the public cloud. A hybrid cloud gives enterprises the ability to retain the advantages of two separate clouds and still deploy new cloud-native applications.
A hybrid cloud is Cost effective.
Through a hybrid approach, the enterprise can achieve the economies of scale that can only be possible in a cloud-based model, while benefiting from the flexibility and scalability that comes with on-site storage.
Figure 2 Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Companies today use cloud computing platforms and other digital technology to explore novel ways to use data to enhance business performance. The creation of new, digitally driven business models has been greatly aided by the adoption of the cloud. A single, centralized administration platform is made possible by hybrid cloud architecture, which may be used to enforce strict security procedures and lower global risk.
Arcana offers cloud services by adopting advanced Containerization (Kubernetes) technology. Other services include; Cloud Infrastructure Planning and Cloud Infrastructure Management. Arcana combines the strength of IT industry giants platforms like IBM, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Learn more by dropping us your queries.
Platform as a Service is a cloud development and deployment environment with the resources organizations need to deliver anything from basic cloud-based apps to complex enterprise applications.
Virtualization is the technology to create a virtual computing environment for running multiple operating systems on a single machine.
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