Everyone in the 21st century is familiar with the concept of cloud computing if they aren’t living under a rock. With organizations planning to spend millions on their cloud strategies, the cloud culture is taking over the entire IT infrastructure.
However, with more and more companies shifting to the cloud, it is becoming increasingly hard to evaluate the perfect cloud model for an organization. Therefore, it is important to learn about all three models before taking the plunge.
The three most commonly used deployment structures are; public, private, and hybrid.
Even though all three cloud computing models have their distinct advantages and disadvantages, we are here to discuss the Hybrid cloud today.
Hybrid Cloud – 101
The Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment with the best of both public and private cloud features. It is a cross between the two and allows you to leverage the maximum benefits of cloud computing as a whole.
It enables you to facilitate your firm with a specific solution, which is tailored for only a single entity. This way, you can divide the workload between a private cloud and a third-party public cloud.
The Hybrid cloud gives you the freedom to balance the costs and computing needs between the two parent cloud models. Furthermore, it gives you a much high level of flexibility and many more deployment options.
To understand this better, let take an example of an e-commerce website. On regular days, the website gets an average amount of traffic, one that has already been estimated by the company so the workload can be managed by the private cloud. But during sale season or holiday season such as Christmas, or Valentine's day, the website experiences high traffic, therefore, they need an additional resource to manage it. Here, they will use the public cloud. So this way, their workload can be divided between the two making the system much more efficient.
Hybrid Cloud – Infrastructure
A hybrid cloud has three essential parts:
- A public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform
- A public cloud, which could be either hosted by a provider or can be on the premises as well
- Connectivity between the two
Usually, a business uses the public cloud for computing instances, storage, analytics, and other such services. But they have little to no control over the architecture of a public cloud. Therefore, they need to deploy a private cloud to achieve a hybrid cloud. An enterprise must ensure that private cloud architecture is compatible with the public cloud.
This means that they need to implement appropriate hardware within the data center, such as servers, storage, and a local area network (LAN), and load balancers. The hybrid model also requires a virtualization layer to facilitate Virtual Machines or containers if they wish to use it. Then they need to sort out the software issues.
Hybrid Cloud – Benefits
Contrary to popular belief, the main benefit of using a hybrid cloud is not cost-optimization. The main benefit is the value that it provides to a fast-moving digital world. Each technology firm has two main agendas; the IT agenda and the business transformation agenda.
The IT agenda only lies in cost-cutting or saving money, and the business agenda focuses only on money-making investments.
The major benefit of a hybrid cloud is agility. It helps the business adapt to change and move in a successful direction much more quickly. You might not feel it, but you most definitely need the combination of public, private, and on-premises resources to gain a competitive edge over the others.
Hybrid Clouds – When to Use it?
Here are a few scenarios, which will help you decide if the Hybrid cloud is for you:
Dynamic workloads
If your organization faces dynamic workloads frequently, then a hybrid cloud strategy will prove to be a good fit for you. This way, you can use a highly-scalable public cloud for the dynamic workload and the private cloud for much less volatile workloads.
Big data processing
Usually, when big data processing takes place, the data is quite volatile. This is why, it is better to run big data analytics on a public cloud, which is much more scalable and ensures data security with the private cloud.
Experimentation
Having a hybrid cloud gives you much more freedom to experiment and understand your workload better. You can transition some of your workloads on a public cloud, evaluate how it works out, and then expand slowly as per your business need.
Flexible Future
There is no way to determine what the future holds for one. That is why you should be fully prepared to tackle any data changes, your firm might require in both the long and the short run.
A hybrid cloud allows you the freedom to match your actual requirements with a compatible combination of public, private, and on-premises resources to tackle all workloads.
Hybrid Cloud and DevOps
Integrating Hybrid Clouds with DevOps can help in accelerating the process of application development and bring down the complexities in the lifecycle. You might face a few challenges along the way, but the benefits will far succeed them.
Using the right DevOps Cloud Computing tools will help you reap the maximum benefits from both the technologies.
Enroll in our Cloud computing bootcamp to learn more about hybrid cloud computing and launch your career in the cloud.