It seems like the debate about public vs. private cloud is never-ending. Each side of the argument has pros and cons, and there is no clear winner. But why choose when you can have both with a hybrid cloud strategy?
In modern IT infrastructure, it’s impossible to find a solution that only fits a public or private cloud model. Every organization has different applications, approaches, and requirements. Hybrid cloud lets you match the right application with the right solution. Private and public cloud can work together seamlessly to give best of both worlds.
You may have heard the buzz around hybrid cloud, but let’s review its benefits and challenges, and how Diamanti helps to address these challenges.
Why do I need a hybrid cloud solution?
1. Flexibility and fit to purpose
Private and public clouds have their own proven benefits. Instead of sacrificing benefits and choosing either public or private, a hybrid approach lets you decide which workload fits where. You can place your mission-critical data on your on-premises private infrastructure, while you can scale your test/dev environment and websites on public clouds on-demand, based on peak load.
2. Future proof
Investing your resources in hybrid cloud could be biggest IT decision your organization will make. It allows you to get best of both worlds. You are not locked in to any specific vendor or technology, and you can easily migrate your workload as needed.
3. Security
Even though public clouds are becoming more secure, nothing can beat the security of having your data reside on premises. Public clouds are limited to security tools offered by providers, while private clouds allow full customization of security policies. With hybrid IT, you can maintain your critical data within private infrastructure while pushing less critical data to the public cloud.
4. Unlimited scalability
Even though private clouds like Diamanti are much more efficient and highly scalable, they are limited to their physical configuration. Hybrid infrastructure let you overflow your workload to the public cloud on demand. This gives you unlimited flexibility for scaling your applications in the event of new product launches, holidays, seasonal peaks, and so on.
5. Performance optimization
The performance of applications running on a public cloud might suffer with shared, public network bandwidth and shared, high-latency, non-native storage. On the other hand, on-premises infrastructure can provide high throughput network and storage bandwidth with very low latency. You can choose to run your critical high performing application on private infrastructure while running highly scalable loads on public infrastructure.
6. Cost optimization
For a private infrastructure, upfront costs can be higher and on-demand scalability could be limited to physical limits of compute/storage/network. But at the same time, operating costs are much lower on private infrastructure compared to public infrastructure. Organizations can optimize their IT costs by wisely distributing the workload across public and private cloud.
7. Business continuity and organizational agility:
Hybrid infrastructure provides resilience, recovery, and contingency. Critical data can be replicated across multiple private and public clusters for DR purposes, ensuring there is no downtime if one goes down. Also with hybrid infrastructure, there is no need to decide upfront where the application will reside, organizations can test the application on either public or private cloud and later decide where to deploy for production.
8. Speed to market
For any organization speed to market is key to success. With hybrid infrastructure, it’s much easier and faster to provide infrastructure that your development or production team might need to deliver the product on time.
9. Network usage optimization
Hybrid cloud let you move heavy external traffic to public cloud, keeping the burden off your private network and giving you more predictability with your private network usage.
Challenges of building a hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud lets you mix-and-match different pieces of the puzzle to come up with the solution that’s best suited for your organization. But even with all the benefits, it could be challenging. Let’s consider a few issues with hybrid cloud.
1. Cost
When using hybrid cloud, you must plan your spending wisely. You need to make sure to not over-provision either public or private cloud. There is a fine line between these decisions and not planning it correctly could cause higher overall costs.
2. Security
Security is one of the biggest concerns when setting up hybrid cloud. When public and private clouds run together, it is important to set proper access controls and policies to prevent security breaches. For some industries, it might be prohibited to store any data off-prem. It’s important to decide what stays on public cloud and what on private infrastructure, and how to make each work seamlessly together while protecting them from each other.
3. Compatibility
There could be differences between stacks running on public and private cloud. It is important to make sure your application is compatible with both ends of the stack.
4. Moving persistent data
It is fairly simple to move or scale stateless applications across different clusters, but stateful applications are a challenge. With datasets getting bigger, moving the data across clusters on-demand is not always easy. To facilitate this mobility, data replication strategies are needed across clusters to provide flexibility, HA and DR in a hybrid environment. Snapshot and mirroring tools are needed to easily migrate stateful applications across clusters.
5. Networking
Every cloud provider has different networking architecture, but in a hybrid environment it’s important that applications running on different networks are able to talk to each other. Application need to be exposed to public gateways or a VPN needs to be maintained across clusters. In addition, bandwidth usage of applications needs to be considered so that critical applications are not overshadowed by bandwidth-hungry, less-critical applications.
Building an enterprise level hybrid cloud brings along many benefits and challenges. It is important to carefully plan and pick correct tools and cloud providers to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits.
How Diamanti helps you build a hybrid cloud strategy
Diamanti is a purpose-built, full-stack private container cloud infrastructure built on open-source technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. It can be integrated with any other private or public cloud, assuming they are running open-source Kubernetes. Diamanti gives you an experience similar to public cloud, allowing you to easily move back and forth between private and public. Let’s see a few of the benefits Diamanti brings to hybrid infrastructure:
1. Simplicity of public, convenience of private
Diamanti brings the simplicity and agility of public clouds to private infrastructure. The biggest benefits public infrastructure brings to an organization is time-to-market and agility. Similarly, Diamanti easily plugs in to your existing network and can be ready to deploy your applications in 15 minutes. This frees organizations from worrying about provisioning infrastructure once they acquired and plugged in Diamanti nodes. This enables organization to have the same experience on-prem as they might have with public clouds, allowing them to easily structure their hybrid needs.
2. Compatibility
Diamanti is a container cloud, and containers allow easy movement of applications without worrying about stack compatibility. As long as clusters are running Kubernetes, applications can be moved and scaled across any cluster on hybrid infrastructure, be it public or private.
3. Cost
Diamanti consolidates full-stack infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, and software. With hyper-consolidation and guaranteed SLAs, Diamanti enables almost 90% resource utilization, reducing capex and opex. This delivers greater ROI for private infrastructure and brings down the TCO for hybrid infrastructure. This also makes it easy for organizations to decide what to keep in public cloud and what to keep in-house.
4. Networking
Diamanti comes with built-in virtual networking, which easily plugs into your existing L2 network. This enables easy pod-to-pod L2 networking and makes the integration with hybrid cloud networks much easier.
5. QOS
Traditionally, a major problem with any public or private infrastructure is that low-priority applications can steal networking or storage bandwidth from high-priority applications running on the same node. Diamanti brings QOS for networking and storage to your private infrastructure. This allows organizations to run more applications without degrading the performance of your high-priority applications. You can run your more critical applications on Diamanti with reliability and guaranteed service levels while moving less critical applications to public cloud.
6. Data movement
The biggest challenge with hybrid infrastructure is being able to move stateful applications between private and public clouds. You can overcome this problem with software-level replication across clouds.
7. Storage Performance
For data intensive applications, performance is always a pain point when running on public cloud, but provisioning the storage is usually easier on public cloud. Diamanti provides high-performance, cluster-local storage with up to one million IOPS per node, while giving cloud-like simplicity to storage provisioning. Organizations can run data-intensive applications on Diamanti to achieve maximum performance, while running non-data-intensive applications on public cloud.
8. Scalability:
Diamanti’s hyper-consolidated infrastructure allows you to run more containers per node than any other platform. You can scale up to 63 stateful containers per node with networking, while you can scale unlimited numbers of non-stateful containers without networking within the physical limitations of CPU and memory. All these with guaranteed service levels for network and storage for critical pods. This allows for massive scalability within the Diamanti platform, giving you more choices to scale on private vs public infrastructure.
Conclusion
It may be hard to justify going with only private or only public approaches. That’s why it is best to have on-premises infrastructure that can handle your average workloads, while overflowing to public clouds when the workload exceeds the resources of the private cloud infrastructure. Diamanti easily plugs in to a hybrid environment while giving you public cloud convenience for your on-prem infrastructure. With Diamanti, you can consolidate your private infrastructure to achieve maximum performance, the lowest latencies, and guaranteed service levels for your containerized applications. Integrating Diamanti with your selected public provider gives you lowest TCO for your hybrid cloud architecture.
