What is the hybrid cloud? | The comparison

What is the hybrid cloud? | The comparison
Cloud computing spawns a growing variety of online services, including popular SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings. To enable cloud computing, programs and data must be removed from the local PC or mobile platform, and stored in this nebulous cloud, on a server at a location remote from the device accessing the resource. Digging deeper, there are three main types of clouds in cloud computing: public, private, and hybrid. A public cloud provides cloud services to the public, either for you personally or for your organization, with the resources shared by many people. Because they typically support multiple clients, they are considered less secure and therefore less suitable for sensitive information, such as sensitive medical data, for example. Resources can be accessed over the Internet, which becomes a requirement for their use, so critical applications that cannot tolerate Internet connectivity downtime should not be placed in the public cloud.

Microsoft Azure Public cloud solutions are available from major tech giants, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Private cloud

At the other end of the spectrum is a private cloud solution. In this model, shared IT resources are dedicated to a single organization. An immediate benefit is that there can be much tighter security to limit access, making it suitable for more sensitive data that may meet industry standards and regulations. that are imposed on industries such as the financial, medical or legal sectors (or any data that must remain classified). For a private cloud solution, the server can be installed on the company premises, called a local server, or off-site, designated as a remote server. The resources on the server may be owned directly by the company or contracted through a vendor that configures the software on the company's server and supports the company's infrastructure through a contract.

The happy medium

Now that we understand the two ends of cloud solutions, public and private, we can more easily understand the middle option, known as hybrid cloud, which is a combination of a public and private cloud solution. . This can be thought of as connecting a public cloud to an internal data center. While a hybrid cloud is often seen by some as a mix of the other two types of cloud solutions, ZDNet's James Sanders notes that: “Public and private clouds (or infrastructure) in a hybrid cloud arrangement are elements separate and independent. This allows organizations to store protected or privileged data in a private cloud..." Combining public and private clouds in a hybrid cloud brings its own advantages and disadvantages. The downside of a hybrid cloud is that it is a more complex business with a combination of resources across multiple platforms and requiring a higher level of expertise high to manage and support Another disadvantage of a hybrid cloud is that the cost is often higher than a public or private cloud setup, as there are the private cloud hardware costs and public cloud Ongoing Subscription costs There are also security concerns, as the public part of the hybrid cloud always presents the multi-tenant security issues of a pure public cloud solution. There can also be latency issues as data is mixed between the private and public parts of the cloud.Special attention should also be paid to the data center that supports the private cloud part of the hybrid cloud, with an appropriate choice of hardware in terms of servers, storage, network connection and load balancers for management. traffic to keep everything running smoothly. .

cloud However, the great advantage is that a hybrid solution offers more options in the available resources, with the ability to use the best of each of the other solutions. It also offers a greater degree of scalability, with the potential to share resources as needed. Finally, the public cloud component makes it easier for mobile and remote workers to access with a hybrid cloud solution, compared to a private cloud solution only.

Secret sauce

The "secret sauce" for bridging public and private clouds into what the end user sees as a system depends on a virtualization layer, also known as a hypervisor. This virtualization layer supports virtual machines (VMs) that access resources in the hybrid cloud. Another layer, called the cloud software layer, sits on top of the virtualization layer. This upper layer provides the capabilities of the cloud to the users. Due to the complexity of setting all this up, the services of a private cloud architect are employed. For example, a common challenge is choosing a virtualization layer and cloud software layer to provide the right support for the target public cloud service. This will allow desired services to seamlessly migrate between the private cloud and the public cloud element, in the larger hybrid cloud ecosystem. This will allow developers to create a service that takes advantage of the resources of the public and private cloud components. A hybrid cloud is particularly suitable for a dynamic workload situation. For example, a cloud service might run under normal business conditions in the corporate private cloud. In high-demand situations, for example, during a busy period in an enterprise where the need exceeds 100% of the private cloud resources, overflow traffic may be directed to the public cloud portion. This ensures smooth running of operations without disrupting availability. It's also cost-effective because the company only pays for additional public cloud resources for the limited time it needs, rather than paying to build a more robust private cloud year-round, which it doesn't; it is used only for a small portion of time. In short, it's actually additional capacity available on demand, known as "cloud explosion."