A hybrid cloud is an IT construction that incorporates some degree of workload management, organization, and portability across two or more environments. Depending on who you ask, those environments may need to include the following:
- At least one private and one public cloud
- Two or more public clouds
- A virtual or bare metal environment connected to at least one cloud, either public or private
These varying requirements come from an earlier cloud computing era, where the difference between public and private clouds was one of location and ownership. However, today’s cloud types are much more complicated, as background and license are abstract issues.
Therefore, it is more beneficial to define hybrid cloud computing by its functions. All hybrid clouds must be able to do the following:
- Connect multiple computers over a network
- Consolidate IT resources
- Scale-out and deploy new resources quickly
- Being able to move workloads between environments
- Incorporate a single unified management tool
- Organize processes with the help of automation.
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How do Hybrid Clouds Work?
The way that public and private clouds work as part of a hybrid cloud is similar to how they do it independently:
- LAN, WAN, VPN, and APIs connect multiple computers.
- The virtualization, the containers or defined storage software extract resources, which can remain grouped into lakes data.
- The management software system allocates those resources to environments where applications can run, remaining then deployed, as requested, with an authentication service.
Independent clouds become hybrid when those environments are connecting as efficiently as possible. That interconnectivity is the only thing that allows hybrid clouds to work, and that is why these clouds are the foundation of edge computing. Besides, it determines how workloads remain moved, management is unified, and processes remain organized. The quality of the networks has a direct effect on how your hybrid cloud works.
How do I Design a Hybrid Cloud?
Each cloud is unique. Private clouds are individual, and there are thousands of public cloud providers. All hybrid cloud models are different, so the way you organize your cloud resources and design a hybrid cloud will have its hallmark. However, some basic principles correspond to the two general ways of developing a hybrid cloud environment: traditional and modern.
Traditional Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Previously, hybrid clouds were the result of connecting a private cloud with a public one. You could design that private cloud on your own or use pre-defined cloud infrastructure, such as OpenStack®
Modern Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Today, hybrid clouds no longer require a broad network of APIs to move workloads from one cloud to another. Modern IT teams run the same operating system in all IT environments, develop and deploy applications as small, stand-alone, offline service groups, and manage everything with a unified PaaS.
If the same operating system remains used, all the hardware system requirements remain extracted, while the orchestration platform removes all of the applications. It creates a seamless, interconnecting computing environment in which applications can move from one domain to another without upholding a complex map of APIs that fails every time applications are updated or cloud providers change.
Are Hybrid Clouds Safe?
A properly designed, integrated, and achieved [hybrid cloud] can be as secure as an on-premises IT infrastructure. While there are some unique challenges to [hybrid cloud] security – such as data migration, increased complexity, and a larger attack surface – the presence of multiple environments can be one of the most robust defenses against security risks. Thanks to all these interconnected environments, companies can choose where to put sensitive data based on requirements. And security teams can consistently adopt a redundant cloud storage system and can increase recovery efforts in the face of disasters.
