đŸšȘ Prologue

Deploy, manage, upscale, pay upfront. Reserve a couple of hundred racks. Forget about these 13 virtual machines. Get promised 99.999% availability. Deliver 99.999% availability to business. Make it fault-tolerant. Make it highly available. Make it secure and private. But also make it so that you can quickly redeploy it.

Wait, that's not how this song goes. Oh, silly me. This is because that song was not made in 2021. That song was released in 2015, and... oh, boy. Quite frankly, there were not that many buzz-words in 2015. Well, at least not in the infrastructure domain.

Now I remember. It went something like this...

> Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail, upgrade it
> Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it...

Speaking of buzz-words, what exactly is infrastructure? Can you buy an infrastructure in the store? What is the current infrastructure/human ratio? Why is it that my cousin who is in IT says that he works in infrastructure? If that is so, Brian, where exactly is the infrastructure you work IN?

Let's get a little more serious and discuss the right topics - hybrid cloud and its unmatchable power in modern infrastructure designs.

💡 Hybrid Cloud, the correct approach

Speaking of hybrid clouds, I can’t seem to ignore that everybody is talking about it nowadays. Indeed it did not become a hot topic lately ‘just because’. What made ‘hybrid-cloud’ (and multi-cloud as well, but this is a topic for another post) so widespread in technology discussions? To answer this question, we have to dig deeper into its details.

Many people get lost in the term hybrid-cloud for one sole reason - the word ‘hybrid.’ It does not imply that we are using two different public cloud providers like AWS & Microsoft Azure. It means we utilize both a public and a private cloud in our architecture. This allows each of our architecture’s building blocks to be assigned to the correct basket - the public or the private one. But why should we complicate that much? Can’t we put all of our infrastructure in the safehouses of the biggest cloud providers on the market? With all of the services provided by the available providers, it shouldn’t be an issue to only use the public cloud, right? Here is the catch - nobody can stop you from doing that. However, as mentioned initially, if the architectural part of your brain weighs the pros and cons of a hybrid-cloud approach, you are most certainly set to lean in that direction.

đŸ€ Hybrid cloud - hot topic for a reason

The hybrid cloud allows businesses to dictate how they want their data to operate. With the public cloud, this is possible to some extent, while companies have complete control over how their data is being stored, transmitted, and processed with the adoption of the hybrid cloud.

For companies affected by GDPR, a hybrid cloud allows for a much more flexible environment by confidentially storing sensitive and regulated data using the private cloud's capabilities. At the same time, their application doesn't suffer performance cuts using the public cloud's ability to scale.

A hybrid cloud allows for flexibility that can't be matched for companies that require substantial storage spaces. Non-sensitive data can be distributed between the public cloud's undeniably good storage services, while the sensitive data can be stored in the safest manner possible - in a private cloud.

These are only a few examples of the hybrid cloud benefits — flexibility, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency - all in the suite of this approach. Done the right way, hybrid cloud saves hassles for any modern business.

Speaking of business, let's jump into the topic of competition. Do cloud providers try to force you to use their services and forget about the private cloud? Or do these providers try to make hybrid cloud easier for you and your business?

đŸ€ Competition or alliance, the provider dilemma

Competition, or alliance, that is the question.

Like any business that wants to attract and keep as many customers as possible, cloud providers prefer you to use their services. However, they are not in any way forcing you to do so. There are, in fact, tools that these providers hand out to you so you can connect your existing private cloud infrastructure to their platform. This makes the hybrid cloud adoption a clean and constructed experience. You and your company can create an integration plan that is easy to follow, minimizing the possible stoppers.

To name a few examples of helping businesses adopt a hybrid cloud, I choose to start with Azure Arc. It is the perfect example of a public cloud provider service that allows people who have already invested in on-premises to leverage their assets to use the Azure ecosystem. I prefer to look at it as an upgrade, evolution even, to what we have become too comfortable with for too long.

Speaking of comfort, AWS is the primary choice for businesses worldwide. An example of how they are helping their customers is AWS Outposts. You can efficiently run AWS infrastructure directly in your data center with this service.

There may be more driving forces and adjustments in a real scenario that need to be made for successful hybrid cloud adoption. Many more services can help any business transform a traditional private cloud workforce into a boosted and powerful hybrid cloud experience. For this purpose, engineers are using the full suite of tools their public cloud provider of choice offers.

🏁 Epilogue

Public or private cloud companies have their computing, storage, assets management, and infrastructure design methods. However, putting hybrid cloud as an option next to either public or private, the result is obvious - you can’t lose by going hybrid. Yes, you may need to re-architecture that one old and settled infrastructure stack, but this will only lead to saving costs, management resources, and most importantly - the inevitable need to adapt to the highly-dynamic world of the cloud.

Any business is set to reach new heights, taking the right amount of time and hours to agree on a good hybrid cloud adoption strategy.

Now, what are you waiting for? Call your team for a meeting and discuss your business upgrade!