What is Hybrid Cloud?
Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a combination of local, private and third party public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. By enabling workloads to move between public and private clouds as computing needs and costs change, hybrid cloud provides greater flexibility for businesses and more data deployment options.
Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Building a hybrid cloud requires availability:
- Public infrastructure platform as a service (IaaS)
- Private cloud development, both on-site or through a hosted private cloud provider
- And adequate Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity between the two environments.
Typically, a company will choose a public cloud to access calculation virtual machines, storage resources or other services, such as large data analytics clusters or computer-free capabilities.
However, a company does not have direct control over the public cloud architecture, so, for deployment, it must design its private cloud to achieve compatibility with the desired public cloud or cloud. This involves implementing appropriate hardware in the data center, including servers, storage, local area networks (LAN) and load balancers.
An enterprise must then use a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, to create and support virtual machines (VMs). Then, the IT team must install a private cloud software layer, such as OpenStack, above the hypervisor to provide cloud capabilities, such as self-service, automation and orchestration, reliability and durability, as well as billing and chargebacks. Private cloud architects will usually create a local service menu, such as a computing instance or database instance, from which the user can choose.
The key to creating a successful hybrid is to choose the hypervisor layer and cloud software that is compatible with the desired public cloud, ensuring proper interoperability with the application programming interface (API) and public cloud services. Implementation of compatible software and services also allows virtual machines to migrate seamlessly between private and public clouds. Developers can also create sophisticated applications using a mix of services and resources across public and private platforms.
Benefits and Use Cases
Hybrid cloud computing enables businesses to use private cloud on-site to accommodate sensitive or critical workloads, and to use third-party public cloud providers to accommodate less critical resources, such as testing and development workloads.
Hybrid is also very valuable for dynamic or highly variable workloads. For example, a transactional order entry system that experiences a significant surge in demand around the holiday season is a good hybrid cloud candidate. Applications can run on private clouds, but use cloud bursting to access additional computing resources from the public cloud when computing demands are soaring.
Another use case is big data processing. A company, for example, can use hybrid cloud storage to maintain its business accumulation, sales, testing and other data, and then run analytic queries on public clouds, which can scale Hadoop or other analytic clusters to support the demands of distributed computing tasks.
Hybrid cloud also allows companies to use a broader mix of IT services. For example, businesses might run workloads that are very important in private clouds, but use database or archive services from public cloud providers.
