Hybrid cloud, the 3 S’s, and now a 4th — simplicity
If you’ve been following along with our series so far, this is the deep dive into why hybrid cloud is important. If this is where you’re starting:
TL;DR hybrid cloud is awesome and you should take a serious look at it (and the other articles).
With me so far? Good. I’m going to take you on a technical tour of what a hybrid cloud looks like, why it’s so valuable, and how you can get the most out of it. Let’s start with what you’ve likely already heard: hybrid cloud is a mix of public and private clouds. Let’s break it down.
First, you have your public cloud offerings. That’s the fun container stuff your developers keep talking about. No matter which provider you go with, you’re going to get a wide variety of options (read: cool toys for nerds like me). A good public cloud provider designs these options to work seamlessly together, making them easy to use. Because they’ve got much bigger data centers than you, they can host your applications for a lot cheaper than you can. That’s the part your boss cares about, but it comes with a lot of caveats.
Enter private cloud. In short, this is usually a dedicated set of data centers for you and only you. You may own it all and you have full control of the data and how it’s managed. Your data stays safe and secure, and legal is happy. So, what’s the downside?
- You now have a bunch of expensive hardware and unused capacity and are potentially bleeding money (and now your boss is mad at you).
- You don’t have the cool toys, I mean offerings from a public cloud (and now your developers are mad at you).
A private cloud on its own is not as easy to use, not as scalable, and much less flexible than a public cloud. So, now you’re torn. Public cloud is fun, hip, and cool. Private cloud gives you peace of mind and full control. This is where hybrid cloud comes in. Hybrid cloud brings the best of both worlds together and mashes them up into a beautiful landscape of endless wonder. OK, not quite, but it’s pretty close when done well. If you’re doing hybrid cloud right, then you have a single platform that abstracts away all the complicated stuff you don’t care about. That means you get the myriad of awesome features of a public cloud with the security and peace of mind of a private one. Behind the scenes it’s both, but your boss and your developers don’t care and they shouldn’t have to. That’s your job.
Alright, now let’s go to the technical part. We’ll revisit the 3S’s from our last article, but break them down a bit differently for you this time and add a fourth S—simplicity.
Speed
Speed is one of those fun words that everyone loves to use but when you ask them what they mean they’ll give you different answers:
- Do you want fast network speed so your users don’t have to wait for your website to load?
- Do you want ease of deployment so you get more features out more often?
- Do you want speed of recovery so you get zero downtime when something goes horribly wrong?
Then great, public cloud has all those things and more. But if you’re reading this, that’s not all you need. You’ve got legacy applications sitting on legacy hardware. You don’t have the time or money to immediately move your whole company into “microservices or whatever”. You need some private cloud services now too.
Hybrid cloud lets you put what you need, where you need it. It allows you to focus on getting your product to market without having to transform everything at once. You can put up that shiny new containerized website in record time and connect it to that complicated application from the 90's that no one dares to touch anymore. Now you’ve got time to rewrite your application the right way without worrying about rushing something out the door.
Scale
Scale is a bit more straightforward than speed. You can scale either horizontally or vertically, each with their own use cases and platform.
Horizontal scaling means you’re getting more copies of what you’ve got. This usually includes your web servers, APIs, MQ, or caching services — basically anything stateless (meaning it doesn’t depend on it being the only version of itself). Almost always, you’re going to want these to be in public cloud—that’s what it’s built for. The great thing about horizontal scaling is that it’s usually quick and automatic. If your site is seeing more traffic, it can automatically scale up to meet demand instead of crashing, burning, and infuriating your customers, and then scale back down to save you money.
Vertical scaling means making individual instances of your services more powerful, adding more CPU, RAM, disk, etc. This is more often the domain of private cloud, where you can get heavyweight servers, GPUs, or even mainframes dedicated to your data-intensive workloads. Whether you’re batch-processing financial transactions or you’ve got machine learning algorithms crunching away at your massive data warehouse, you can get the power you need, where you need it.
Hybrid cloud brings you the best of both worlds here, bringing the scaling technology of the public cloud to your private cloud workloads. This means you can quickly bring up more powerful servers more easily, or scale services automatically across the world for your global workload. Now both your site and the data behind it are flexible enough to handle anything you throw their way.
Security
One of the most direct ways that a private cloud can make your data more secure is by running on a dedicated network. Such a network would only be accessible by those in your company, and externally protected by a VPN. This can give you much greater control over your data and access, but limits your flexibility. A well-implemented hybrid cloud strategy can tie together that private network with your public cloud components, giving your applications’ components much needed flexibility. This means your web front end can be deployed in cloud-native containers and still communicate securely with the sensitive data in its database.
A more subtle facet of security is location. Even in today’s cloud-focused world, location still plays a very important role in application deployment. Location can play an important role in security in a few ways:
- It’s expensive to maintain secure data centers across the world.
- Legal regulations around data privacy can restrict where in the world data can be stored and processed.
- The more jumps your front end is away from your back end, the greater the exposure risk.
From this we see that synchronizing your public and private cloud locations has significant impact on your security. A strong hybrid cloud solution functions with a limited set of private data centers in strategic global regions matched with regional public cloud hubs. Some offerings will even deploy portions of public cloud functionality within the private data centers, maximizing potential savings. Either will result in not only greater flexibility and security, but also lower latency for the most demanding applications.
Simplicity
What all of the above leads us to is simplicity: simplicity for you, your developers, and your customers. Simple is better when it comes to getting your new offerings out there. Your developers can work faster, your data is more secure, your offerings get to market more quickly and your company, your boss, and (hopefully) you are both saving and making more money.
Speaking as someone who’s been working on such a solution, one of the fun things about building something like this is that you get to turn something incredibly complex into something simple to use. The end goal is something that just works the way you expect and want it to, for you and your customers.
So let’s wrap things up here. Hybrid cloud is worth your time for the following reasons:
- You get all the strengths of private and public clouds melded into a beautiful whole.
- You get speed through leveraging public cloud offerings and techniques in the private cloud.
- You get scale through combining the swarm that is public cloud with the sheer power of a private cloud.
- You get security through co-location, network isolation, and intelligent automation.
- You get simplicity by design, bringing everything you need into one place and getting you what you need, when you need it.
- It. Just. Works.
That’s it from me. Hopefully you’ve seen the benefit of looking into this yourself, for both your company and your customers. If you’re still not convinced, keep following this series for even more awesome information and stories to inspire your own journey. I guarantee it’ll be worth your time.
Thomas Edmonson manages CIO Hybrid Cloud SRE Automation at IBM. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
