Introduction to Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid Cloud is mainly said to be the composition of more than or equal to two clouds which can be in the form of private, public, or community clouds which are distinct entities in a way but are also bound together in some way or the other, thereby offering a multitude of benefits of various deployment models. In addition, the term hybrid clouds are also associated with connecting, dedicate the services, and manage using cloud resources.
According to Gartner’s definition of a hybrid cloud, it is merely a service, typically a cloud computing-based service, which consists of a combination of private, community, and public cloud-based services generally provided by different service providers.
It can cross the isolation and also the boundaries laid down by the service providers and therefore can’t be easily put in one single category among the above three categories. The capability of aggregation, customization, or integration can be integrated among other cloud services.
Basically, it is a perfect blend of the on-prems, private cloud, third party cloud, and public cloud-based services, along with the orchestration among these services. This is essential at times due to the increasing workload and varied advantages offered regarding computing needs and the changes in costing prices. In addition, hybrid cloud also provides businesses with a higher level of flexibility and a wide variety of deployment options.
Hybrid Cloud Architecture
- The hybrid cloud architecture consists of the availability of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), which is a public platform such as AWS ( Amazon Web service), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.
- It also consists of on-prem systems. The private cloud construction, which is either on-prem or it can be through a private cloud-hosted server provider. An efficient system of WANs, i.e. wide area network, is also required to establish connectivity among themselves. Generally, an enterprise will use the public clouds to access the computational instances, other resources such as storage resources and big data systems, and clusters or cloud-based serverless computational units.
- If you see from an enterprise point of view, an enterprise doesn’t have any straight control over the use of architecture in a public cloud.
- In such cases, the hybrid cloud comes into play as the private cloud should be used to achieve compatibility by making use of the desired clouds, public or private. This can involve the usage of hardware inside the data centers, which also includes servers, hefty storage, load balancers, and a huge local area network (LAN). Other components from hybrid cloud architecture include a hybrid user interface, hybrid processing, hybrid backup, hybrid backend, hybrid data, hybrid application functions, hybrid multimedia, and web-based application, hybrid development environment.
- When you migrate from a traditional cloud domain to a new and advanced multi-cloud or hybrid setup, some constraints are imposed by the existing applications, highlighting the unique set of features and capabilities each and every computing environment has to offer. One of them is the tiered hybrid which categorizes most of the applications to be as either front end or backend type. Those which are frontend-based applications are straight away exposed to the target users or devices, and therefore they are performance-sensitive applications and become subject to quick releases and enhancements. The backend applications are more often than not involved with the storage and management of data. On the other hand, frontend applications are all about being stateless or is only used for managing small chunks of data. The key challenges imposed on the backend services include data handling in volume and helping it getting secured properly.
Advantages
Given below are the advantages mentioned:
- The front-end-based applications have a strong dependency on backends and occasionally on front-end-based applications, but the backends are independent, irrespective of frontends. Therefore, isolated and migrating frontends tend to become less complex compared to the migration of the back-based applications, which would also have complex dependencies.
- The frontend-based applications are often stateless in nature, or they do not have the data management all by themselves, and therefore they tend to be comparatively less prone to errors to migrate.
- The frontend systems are mainly subject to quick and frequent changes, and therefore when these applications are run on the public cloud setup, it simplifies the CI/CD deployments and the processes which can be used to roll out updates in an automated and efficient manner.
- The frontends which are performance-sensitive and all those which incur frequent changes have substantially benefited from the load balancing, autoscaling features, and multi-region-based deployments that a cloud deployment enables.
- Whether the user interfaces or the APIs are being implemented or it comes about handling data ingestion or IoT (Internet of things), these front-based applications can benefit directly from the facilities and capabilities of cloud services such as CDN use cloud IoT offer, Firebase, etc.
Hybrid Cloud Management Tools
There is a huge list of hybrid cloud management tools and software solutions available in the market.
- MultiCloud
- Wrike
- Bitium
- IBM Cloud Orchestrator
- Zoolz Intelligent Cloud
- Apache CloudStack
- Rightscale Cloud management
- Symantec Cloud and Web security
- Microsoft Azure Cost management
- Manage Engine Applications Manager
- Cloud Health
- App Formix
- Cloudcraft
- Service Now Cloud Management
- Morpheus
- OpenStack
- Cloudify
- Centrify Application Service
- Intelligent Contract
- Cloud Lifecycle Management
Let us discuss some of them in detail:
1. Wrike
- It is an online software used for project management and is capable of handling multiple functions for different industries.
- It also serves as a consolidated workspace for distributed and co-located teams, and therefore this platform is used to serve with the most comprehensive set of techniques and tools, which is essential for cloud management.
- The features include task automation, analytics, and performance measuring. The enterprise-grade security solutions are also offered to ensure that the company-related confidential information is not given and protected at all times.
- This platform also has a robust set of APIs and capabilities that help in extending user functions of the product as per the needs of the business.
2. IBM Cloud Orchestrator
- This is an efficient cloud management platform service that is designed to keep in mind the automation for cloud services provisioning by using policy-based tools that can be made use to configure, deploy development environments, provision, and service management.
- In the same way, management, monitoring, securing of environments, and backup in minutes. All this can be done by making use of a single service and a self-service interface.
- It provides a list of customizable features and adherence to strong SLAs. It also provides an end to end cloud services and management. Apart from that, cloud configuration, deployment, and provisioning are also something that the IBM cloud orchestrator takes care of easily.
- The cloud management tools and software address the optimization and streamlined flow of complex tasks, which involves the efficient management of private, hybrid, and public cloud systems and infrastructural systems.
- The software, in this case, can be seen to gather and deploy scalable and flexible cloud management-based tools that are specifically designed to assist enterprises in pursuing cloud-based computing strategies. Tasks such as security audits, disaster recovery, compliance management, and contingency planning are the ones that usually form part of the strategies.
Other features and capabilities for which you can easily look out are:
- More than One Cloud Management: This is the one that pertains to interoperability and allows the application to be built for the one-time environment to work on another by ensuring that the configuration and the code are not changed.
- Application-based Life Cycle Support: This comes with the ability to check, manage, and monitor various life events built of typical applications comprising code updates, performance optimization, security patches, backups, etc.
- Automation: In this, the applications are programmatically managed, which can include a lot of applications associated with repetitive tasks when it comes to larger environments.
- Flexibility: This one is responsible for allowing for the usage of easy changes and customization on application-based frameworks, databases, and instance sizes, and other attributes to help cope with the complexity and put all of this under control.
- Cost Management: This one is responsible to provide cost reporting, show back, and forecasting, and that too, especially when IaaS or infrastructure as a service and the surge in the cloud pricing is variable and gets billed normally by the per-instance or by the hour.
- Security: This is helpful in safeguarding and protecting against cyber and vulnerable threats. Cloud hosting services and applications are all encompassed under SaaS (Software as a service), which becomes the most popular cloud-based computing model being used today. Successful design asks for a simultaneous balance between desired economic, strategic, technical, and risk attributes, and not always is complex designs a better fit. This all depends on the organization you are a part of.
Recommended Articles
This is a guide to What is Hybrid Cloud? Here we discuss the architecture and different types of hybrid management tools. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –
