Deploying and Managing Applications With Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid Cloud App Development & Management

Cloud computing has become an imperative and integral part of the modern IT landscape. To seize myriad opportunities and benefits of the cloud and bring tangible business value, organizations are implementing strategies that upgrade and streamline their data and applications. With respect to the increased adoption of cloud computing services, strategies to modernize cloud applications are also on the path of accelerated growth. Especially, hybrid cloud deployment and management are in the spotlight. 

The reasons why the hybrid cloud management strategy is driving the trend are not a secret anymore. The most crucial and biggest reason of all is that it enables the users to leverage the benefits of both public and private cloud deployments. It depends on the need for execution speed, data privacy and protection, and availability of resources. 

In this blog, we will discuss the implications, deployment, and management of hybrid cloud applications and why is it important for organizations of all sizes to opt for these ever-increasing trends. 

An Introduction to Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid Cloud- an amalgamation of using private and public clouds to host your infrastructure and applications. It is becoming a de-facto standard for cloud computing adoption rather than being just a transitory architecture. According to research and surveys submitted by several industries, more than 70 percent of organizations all over the world are either using or evaluating the implications of hybrid cloud today. Usually, there are two distinct ways in which hybrid cloud deployments and movements are occurring: public to private cloud and private to public cloud.

• Public to Private Cloud

Companies that were birthed in the cloud environment and utilized the public cloud for scalability without splurging on IT organizations are realizing that, over a period of time, the expenditure and costs associated with the public cloud adds up. Another aspect of shifting from public to private cloud is that once user demands and requisites attain a steady state, the need for auto scalability is not significant. Businesses can preeminently save by running a private OpenStack in their own data center instead of just running and deploying full-scale production on public clouds. These practical realizations have dawned upon a plethora of companies that have started locating a majority of their workloads in-house to boost cost-efficiency and garner more control over their resources and data.

• Private to Public Cloud

Organizations with huge IT investments in their on-premises data center are progressively shifting certain workloads to the public cloud infrastructure to gain scalability, efficiency, and agility. Workloads that had sporadic demands were gradually moved to the public cloud. Bound by security and privacy restrictions, a majority of these existing enterprises tend to keep their data in their private cloud and on-premises.

Overall, the shift of workloads from public to private and vice versa is necessitating the need for a robust, streamlined, and stable hybrid cloud architecture.

With this requirement and much-needed movement, businesses must look out for solutions regarding how to span applications across such an agile hybrid environment. An application generally runs on a stack that inculcates:

• Data sources such as NoSQL or SQL databases
• The operating system
• Front-end codes, may or may not have dependencies on third-party services
• Middleware such as web servers, application servers, message queues, and so on

Also Read: Realizing The Metaverse With Edge Computing

How To Build A Robust Hybrid Cloud Environment?

Depending on the business demands and needs, every cloud deployment model is different because public clouds are diverse and private clouds are one-of-a-kind. Therefore, there is not any scope for a one-size-fits-all solution. How enterprises develop their cloud infrastructure is as unique as a thumbprint but there are still two basic ways of constructing a hybrid cloud deployment and management solution.

1. Conventional Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Conventional hybrid cloud deployment and management are when a private cloud infrastructure is connected to a public cloud environment using colossal iterations of middleware in a sophisticated and complex manner. All businesses need is to link prepackaged private cloud resources with a public cloud environment. As a majority of cloud service providers have preconfigured VPNs in their cloud infrastructure subscription package, streamlining and moving resources between the two infrastructures becomes a lot easy, however, it still needs a powerful middleware.

2. Modern Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Enterprises find it vital to have the application portability to run within the cloud infrastructure instead of connecting two different cloud environments. Therefore, they often build their customized hybrid cloud infrastructure and deploy applications independently as small and loosely coupled services.

With a stable, uniform platform running under the same OS in each environment, the efficiency and universality of applications can be stretched to the underlying environments. The same Operating System extracts all the hardware requisites while orchestration extracts all the application needs. This enables businesses to develop an interrelated cloud ecosystem in which app movement without APIs implementation is possible and it is also changeable with any update.

Core Capabilities of Hybrid Cloud App Management Solutions

In simple terms, hybrid cloud management is a discipline, however, it is almost always practiced with specialized cloud app management tools. We have listed some of the common capabilities offered by HCM or Hybrid Cloud Management solutions:

• Release and deployment orchestration – supporting CI/CD and DevOps workflows by enabling developers to automate dev deployment, test, and production environments.

• Service aggregation – showing applications and services running on multiple cloud environments in a single place and enabling businesses to manage them as a single unit.

• Self-service – enabling users to consume, deploy and terminate workloads without fretting about the underlying infrastructure.

• Workload and cost analytics – offering actionable, rich data in accordance with what is running on the hybrid cloud infrastructure as well as the costs incurred by cloud service providers.

• Cost management – enabling organizations to set flexible cost policies and models across cloud solutions to amplify ROI. For instance, by moving data to the most budget-friendly applicable options for data storage.

• Integration and APIs – making it streamlined and easy to integrate hybrid cloud management with existing enterprise systems and app development tools, both on-premises and in the cloud.

• Workload migration – furnishing fast, automated, and low-risk options for shifting workloads from private to public cloud environments and vice versa.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) – allowing users to access and consume databases as well as other common infrastructure elements in the form of a managed service.

Summing Up

It is crucial that enterprises focus on the multi-cloud deployment tools which will ultimately enable them to streamline automated application release processes. It will further help in improved collaboration, mitigate any risks with more customized solutions, accelerate the development and delivery of ready-to-market products, and deploy even more complex hybrid applications in a secured and safe way. Leveraging a hybrid cloud deployment and management platform to integrate applications into a multi-cloud ecosystem not only facilitates the automation of diverse cloud deployment processes but also offers a continuous deployment strategy coupled with robust and powerful pipeline capabilities.

If you are looking for cloud application development services or migrate cloud apps to a hybrid environment, feel free to drop us a line. Our experts will get back to you within 24 hours.