Hybrid Cloud: An Overview, Expectations, and Benefits
By Shantanu Kaushik
Cloud computing is evolving. Many new concepts and practices are introduced regularly. Cloud computing started its journey as a virtual and remote infrastructure that enabled businesses and organizations to leverage strong backend services without having to pay an extraneous amount of money for physical computing resource assembly and management. Cloud computing offers many benefits to its users over the traditional method of computing. These benefits include elasticity, better collaboration, cost-cutting, mobility, upgrades, and security.
Using a public cloud is now a common practice, but that comes with a trade-off in performance. A private cloud is a go-to option. There is a growing demand for Hybrid Cloud solutions today, as it provides seamless scalability and ensures quick adaptation to changing business needs. The days of deploying resources are far behind. Now, customer-centric solutions have to be rolled out to capture the modern-day market.
Hybrid Cloud | Introduction
A hybrid cloud is a mixture of all of the good things from public and private clouds. It addresses the expectations and challenges of public and private clouds and offers solutions. It provides a level of flexibility that public and private cloud platforms lacked. Hybrid Cloud architecture provides workload portability and management across public and private clouds. With the introduction of innovations like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), a desperate need for intelligent cloud solutions is rising. These solutions are possible with the Hybrid Cloud architecture.
Hybrid Cloud architecture includes:
- 1 or more private cloud
- 1 or more public cloud
- A bare-metal or a virtual environment
- WAN
- A Virtual Private Network (VPN)
- Alibaba Cloud API
- Container Service
- Storage and Database services
- Management Tools
Previously, ownership and location defined the traditional cloud computing architecture differences between a public and private cloud. Now, these practices have become much more evolved and complex. Today, public clouds don’t necessarily run on off-premises since it runs with cloud services based on on-premise data centers.
A hybrid cloud is expected to:
- Have Multi-Connection Capability
- Resource Management
- Resource Orchestration and Faster On-Demand Provisioning
- Workload Distribution
- Automation
A public or private cloud becomes a hybrid cloud setup when they are connected . When there is a sudden spike in traffic usage of applications running on a private cloud, these applications automatically burst and move to the public cloud. This is called “cloud-bursting.” This workload sharing enables resource management since new resources have to be provisioned when usage spikes happen. Instead, the load is intelligently shared to the public cloud. Based on the environment’s capability, varied services can be accessed between public and private clouds. This is what gave birth to edge-computing.
Quick Tip: Edge Computing
Edge computing is a distributed computing resource that integrates information to edge nodes. It allows data to be processed in real-time without the need for it to be uploaded to a centralized processing system.
Let’s look at a comparison between public clouds, private clouds, and Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud:
Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud combines the best features from public and private clouds. Alibaba Cloud thought about the challenges organizations and development teams face and developed the Hybrid Cloud solution.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud | Alibaba Cloud
Let’s list a few concerns and how the Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud solution addresses these concerns:
Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud features Apsara Stack, Apsara Stack which is known for its industry-leading features and support. It provides machine learning (PAI), hyper-scale clusters, and multi-layered security. This ensures better business continuity.
Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud supports both enterprise central node deployment and edge node deployment, also known as the Agility edition. Both of these solutions provide multiple solutions, panning over industries. This ensures a cost-effective setup.
Apsara Cloud ZStack or Apsara Stack Agility Elastic Compute Service is a dedicated Hybrid Cloud solution. It can be easily deployed to manage your hardware in the data centers or any servers on the edge. It also supports hybrid cloud environments on all on-premise deployments. The most impressive part about this is the setup time. One node can be deployed in roughly 30 minutes and can further be scaled out to multiple servers whenever required.
Conclusion
The Hybrid Cloud solution is all about maintaining compatibility and simplifying the management of your deployment. If you can achieve this, your deployment is a successful one. Alibaba Cloud ensures success with seamless deployment scenarios that let you extend your services across on-premise and cloud-based resources. Centralized management ensures efficiency. Whether it is deployment across multiple clouds, DevOps practice, expansion, or troubleshooting, centralized management provides a swift experience.
These solutions collectively deliver a sophisticated Hybrid Cloud solution that responds well to business expansion. Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud solution’s disaster recovery, back, upgrades, and elastic scaling makes it a highly capable and reliable architecture.
NEXT in Line
1. Evolution of Hybrid Cloud Management
In this article, we will talk about Hybrid Cloud management and how it has evolved.
2. The Best Practices to Build a Hybrid Cloud
In this article, we will talk about the best practices to build a sophisticated hybrid cloud.
3. Implementation and Migration Scenarios of Hybrid Cloud
In this article, we will explain the implantation scenarios and tools, like Apsara Stack and Alibaba Cloud ZStack, along with migration scenarios.
The views expressed herein are for reference only and don’t necessarily represent the official views of Alibaba Cloud.
