What is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a combination of one or more public and private cloud environments. It is a set of virtual resources – developed from hardware that is owned and managed by a third-party company, and hardware that belongs to the company that uses the cloud. Users can access resources on demand through self-service portals that are supported by automatic scaling and dynamic resource allocation.
Although the public and private cloud environments that make up a hybrid cloud are still single and individual entities, the migration between them is simplified with the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) that help transfer resources and workloads. This independent and connected architecture allows companies to execute critical workloads in the private cloud and less sensitive workloads in the public cloud, and extract resources from any of the two environments as they wish.
Current hybrid cloud environments can include, among other features, local infrastructure, traditional virtualization, servers without an operating system, and containers. In addition, the hybrid cloud can be made up of several public clouds hosted by more than one provider. More about this you can find on Aviatrix website.
What interests everyone is how Hybrid cloud works. Interoperability is the fundamental basis of hybrid clouds. Without it, public and private clouds can exist independently, but they are not considered hybrid clouds, even if they are used by the same company.
It is possible to manage hybrid cloud environments manually with several management tools, redundant policy implementations and additional operations personnel. However, there are cloud management tools that simplify the process because they provide unified management and operations for hybrid environments.
A private cloud can simplify scalability and provide on-demand access to resources, in addition to what can be easily achieved with virtualization on its own. Public clouds can further facilitate scalability, providing access to an unlimited (in theory) pool of resources. When both distributions are integrated in a hybrid environment, it is possible to scale vertically or horizontally, as necessary. Clouds support native cloud applications with horizontal scalability, and virtualization supports traditional workloads through vertical scalability.
When to Use?
The hybrid cloud is especially valuable for dynamic or highly changing workloads. For example, a transactional order entry system that experiences significant demand peaks around the holiday season is a good candidate for the hybrid cloud. The application could run in the private cloud, but use the explosion of the cloud to access the additional computing resources of a public cloud when computing demands peak. To connect public and private cloud resources, this model requires a hybrid cloud environment.
Another hybrid case of using the cloud is the processing of big data. A company, for example, could use hybrid cloud storage to retain its accumulated business, sales, test and other data, and then run analytic queries in the public cloud, which can scale to support demanding distributed computing tasks.
Despite its benefits, the hybrid cloud can present technical, managerial and managerial challenges. Private cloud workloads must have access to and interact with public cloud providers, so the hybrid cloud requires API support and strong network connectivity.