Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of private cloud and public cloud services with orchestration between the platforms allowing data and applications to be shared between them. An enterprise might be testing an app on public cloud or private cloud and running actual production on a different cloud, or they’re running backup and recovery on public cloud but actual production on private cloud. There’s a separation of use case, but it’s essentially for the same workload.
Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Indian executives are investing in hybrid multi-cloud to drive business transformation finds IBM survey. The value derived from hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud, survey reveals. By 2023, Indian organizations expect to be using an average of 10 clouds and globally, 64% of advanced cloud companies recognize the need for enterprise transformation and application modernization to go hand-in-hand.
What’s making a true hybrid cloud strategy more possible today is a slew of new orchestration capabilities that help move apps among the different platforms. However, though more orchestration tools are becoming available, it’s still extremely challenging to move a workload from one cloud platform to another. For any cloud-aspiring or already cloud-intensive enterprise, a hybrid cloud strategy comes down to finding the right collection of cloud technologies and orchestration tools that makes the organization faster and more efficient.
All hybrid clouds should:
- Connect multiple computers through a network.
- Consolidate IT resources.
- Scale out and quickly provision new resources.
- Be able to move workloads between environments.
- Incorporate a single, unified management tool.
- Orchestrate processes with the help of automation.
Today’s hybrid clouds are architected differently. Instead of connecting the environments themselves, modern IT teams build hybrid clouds by focusing on the portability of the apps that run in the environments. An analogy would be: Instead of building a local 2-lane road (fixed middleware instances) to connect 2 interstate highways (a public cloud and a private cloud), you could instead focus on creating an all-purpose vehicle that can drive, fly, and float. Either strategy still gets you from one place to another, but there’s a lot less permitting, construction, permanency, and ecological impact if you focus on a universally capable vehicle.
Modern IT teams build hybrid clouds by focusing on the car—the app. They develop and deploy apps as collections of small, independent, and loosely coupled services. By running the same operating system in every IT environment and managing everything through a unified platform, the app’s universality is extended to the environments below it.
