A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that combines public and private clouds, allowing organizations to utilize the benefits of both.
In a hybrid cloud, an organization can store and process critical data and applications in its private cloud, while using the public cloud for non-sensitive data, such as testing and development.
The hybrid cloud model is becoming increasingly popular among organizations because it enables them to optimize their IT infrastructure while keeping costs under control.
Hybrid cloud environments can provide a more seamless and integrated user experience, with the ability to move workloads between public and private clouds based on business needs.
Multi-cloud on the other hand, is a setup that involves the use of multiple cloud computing platforms from different vendors.
In a multi-cloud environment, an organization can leverage the strengths of different cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others, to achieve a range of benefits such as increased scalability, flexibility, resilience, and cost-effectiveness.
Hybrid cloud for its part, enables businesses to have greater flexibility in their IT infrastructure, allowing them to leverage the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud for non-critical workloads, while keeping sensitive data and applications within their private cloud, which provides greater control, security, and compliance.
Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report highlights the fact that a vast majority of enterprises have adopted a hybrid cloud model, and almost 87% have a Multi-Cloud approach.
Even Kubernetes, which was envisioned as a way to abstract away from infrastructure dependency, is implemented differently by different cloud providers.
So the challenge the customers must solve is how to ensure data applications in different cloud environments are distributed and synchronized.
Cloud providers make it fairly easy to upload data into their platform, most times with no extra fees, but if a customer wants to move data out of the platform, they can get hit with hefty 'data egress' fees.
The situation is compounded manyfold when leaders have to plan for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments.
A thorough discussion around security and governance for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments will be covered in a future blog, but for now, customers should consider a few items as essential to ensure success.
In Multi-Cloud environments, customers may find that a single autoscaling process does not work the same way for every cloud vendor.
In addition to right-sizing the Kubernetes deployments, SmartScaler utilizes Reinforced Learning to understand the specific characteristics of each cloud provider's autoscaling process and optimizes the deployment accordingly.
One reason enterprises are hesitant about hybrid cloud or multi-cloud setups is the lack of skills in such projects.
Any simple search will provide multiple instances where one of the major cloud providers suffered outages that impacted businesses.
Simply putting one's trust in the distributed cloud instance does not protect an application.
Since cloud vendors are not going to encourage workloads to be routed to a competitor, IT leaders should implement solutions such as Kubeslice that abstract the workload from the underlying infrastructure, ensuring the specific application is always available via intelligent routing.
At an enterprise level, businesses should adopt a Cloud Native Disaster Recovery strategy that provides a baseline for Kubernetes applications and databases, and allow individual teams to tweak it to their specific needs.
This Cyber News was published on feeds.dzone.com. Publication date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 19:43:05 +0000