Hybrid Cloud
Companies and organizations differ in size, activities, and needs. Because of that, when an application or workload needs to be deployed, the different requirements and possible solutions need to be considered. For some companies, a specific workload might be more cost effective to run on premises on its own equipment. In other situations, that same company might be better off running certain workloads in a public cloud. For example, consider a DevOps process. DevOps is a set of procedures and tools as well as a mentality for how the work of the development teams and operations teams should be organized, where a product of the development team can be easily tested and then deployed in a production environment. This means the operations teams need to be capable of creating and re-creating the same environment used first in the development, then in testing, and finally for deployment in production. However, there’s one additional important difference: the production environment, unlike the development and testing environments, has to be capable of scaling!
The process of building a specific environment in a private data center can be time- and resource-consuming. It requires planning. In some situations, additional equipment needs to be acquired, and resources are needed to set up that equipment and configure it. In other words, this process usually takes time. And when it comes to scaling, the process is the same, unless it was taken into account from the beginning, but this is rarely the case.
If the company is required to run these workloads in-house, the task becomes complicated. The company will have to build these environments in its own data center and deal with the scalability challenges.
The opposite can also be true: the company can build the development and testing environments, but it isn’t cost-effective to run the production environment with the needed scale.
Also, the company might develop a solution that’s idle, or at least working at a minimum capacity, for most of the year, and then for a specific short period of time, the solution requires massive computing resources. How does one justify a multimillion-dollar budget for equipment that will be used for only one month (or less) of the year?
In such situations, companies can benefit from combining the resources of their private clouds and a public cloud. This is known as a hybrid cloud (see Figure 21-15), which is defined as follows:
Figure 21-15 Hybrid Cloud Characteristics
“The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).”
An important detail of a hybrid cloud is that a communication technology must be used to allow for the seamless moving of the workloads between the clouds. This communication needs to be protected, and different approaches can be used—from private leased lines to solutions based on virtual private networks (VPNs), to the latest approach, which uses software-defined connectivity with overlay networks.
As of late, the industry has adopted the use of the term multicloud, which is an upgrade of the hybrid cloud, as it demands integration between the private clouds of a customer with a minimum of two public clouds. Currently the hybrid cloud has the widest adoption, as companies are starting to move in the direction of multicloud.
The major benefit of using hybrid and multicloud is that the consumer can dynamically decide which environment offers the best combination of price, resources, and protection for each workload. This allows the workloads to be moved between the clouds in a transparent way for the end user.
