Hey everyone, today let's talk about hybrid cloud. Now by the book it refers to a cloud computing
architecture with two or more environments consisting of public and private clouds,
on-premises, and these days even edge environments.
But without the right strategy, hybrid cloud can actually pose a number of challenges.
Now today we're going to go through an example to lay out some of those advantages and disadvantages
of a fictional distribution company that started to undergo that hybrid
cloud transformation process. Now we're going to start with what they have kind of on-premises.
Now right off the bat let's start with this legacy application that they've got.
Now this is an application that enables their users to get shipment and tracking information
and it continues to work so they don't really have a good reason to modernize it, although
it is kind of running on some legacy, old school, let's say Java EE based monolithic architecture.
In addition, they've also got some customer data that's running on-premises. Now this is
one of the key advantages of hybrid cloud is it lets you run workloads where you need them.
So in this particular case to comply with GDPR or maybe some other regulations they need to
keep that data on-premises which is actually a pretty cool advantage of hybrid cloud that they
can continue to do that. Now, they've also got some HR software running on-premises,
we're going to call this BPMS, or business process management software,
and this is going to allow their customers to do or rather their workforce to do things like
requesting time off, or maybe you know doing some purchase work orders that kind of thing.
So that's what they've got on-prem. Now we mentioned that they've started the hybrid cloud
transformation, they started to take advantage of cloud native, so let's see what they've done
in the public cloud. Now we've distilled the cloud into kind of three major categories in the past,
so Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service.
Now, let's start with PaaS and what they've done here is they've taken advantage of a Kubernetes,
or container-based environment, maybe even something like managed OpenShift running in
the cloud to create a new version of the same application we talked about before the one one
that works for mobile users. So mobile backend as well as a database there that kind of works
for mobile users to be able to get tracking and shipment information. But this led to an increased
cost and support to maintain all those users, so they started to take advantage of another service
available in the cloud. So here's where SaaS comes in. They took a chat bot and they built
it into that application and that enables them to offset some of that increased support costs.
In addition, let's say they're also using some of the SaaS capabilities for IoT
for their delivery drivers, maybe in their warehouses, their distribution centers, that kind
of thing. So IoT is helping you know track the goods and maybe making sure they're temperature
controlled, that kind of thing. And finally, for IaaS, here's an environment that I think kind of
benefits from lift and shift. So some of that business process management software
that they've got running on-prem. Maybe they've migrated some of that software over to the cloud,
and I think that's an excellent opportunity to start taking advantage of IaaS is by kind of doing
that lift and shift, taking advantage of some of that software and moving it there. Maybe they're
also running some CMS systems like WordPress for content management and they're running that as
software on some VMs that are made available through the IaaS capabilities in the cloud.
Now those two environments are integrated together because you know they've got some shared data,
obviously the web interface and the mobile backend were probably using a similar
data source. Finally they've also got edge environments, so these are going to be things
like distribution centers. They're called edge environments because they're at the edge, they're
where data is being created and these distribution centers basically enable the customer to do things
like kind of run workloads right where the data is being created. So maybe something like Kubernetes,
or again OpenShift, a distribution of Kubernetes to manage the edge workloads where data is really
being created. And those are obviously going to be integrated to the on-premises and cloud
environments to share data about shipments so their users are getting the latest and greatest
information about you know where that shipment is. So this is where the the company is today
and they've run into a number of challenges. So number one, they have increased complexity.
So as they've gone from on-premises to the cloud and all these engine environments now they have
kind of an increased number of environments, so their ops teams have to maintain that.
In addition, they need a way to port assets from one environment to another. So, so far
they haven't necessarily run into any issues but they're starting to build a chat bot into the
mobile backend and say hey maybe we should start taking advantage of that on our web application
as well. And they're finding they're not able to easily do that, their DevOps teams are struggling
because their assets aren't quite portable, maybe they have multiple vendors they're working with
there isn't that consistency. And the last concern I'll raise is security,
more environments, higher surface area of attack, their security team has to kind of invest more
resources to help maintain these solutions. So there is a solution to all of this and it's taking
on a unified and open hybrid cloud approach and that's going to start at the infrastructure layer
that we've already talked about a little bit. So, that infrastructure layer is going to be things
like the on-premises environment, on-premises environment, it's going to be public and private
cloud environments, as well as edge locations. But here's where the key piece kind of starts to
kind of work out. So at the foundational layer they need to start building some standardization.
So here's where they can start building in a consistent operating system. So, something like
Linux, or RHEL, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is going to help here because their developers can
work against a single operating system across these multiple environments.
And I mentioned RHEL because that brings me to my next point here the platform layer.
And here's where they're going to be running something like Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is great because it gives you that consistent container based environment
that works in any kind of location on-premises, edge, the cloud, but you can even take it a step
further with OpenShift container platform which is going to give you that enterprise supported
approach to containers, and again, it's great because it runs anywhere.
Finally, the key to all of this is the solutions. So this consistency and standardization enables
customers to focus on standardized solutions across the board so this can be things like the
apps that they're developing, or the data that they need to manage, or even security solutions
that they're building across the board. And this is just scratching the surface there's other use
cases here that I'm not even diving into. Things like integration, managing these multiple cloud
environments, automation, that kind of thing. But this standardized layer and platform enables them
to focus on solutions that work across the board. Now this is going to lead to a number
of advantages. Now the number one thing about hybrid cloud is that it needs to be portable.
That means your workloads need to be able to move across environments. Now we mentioned they've got
a monolithic legacy application architecture on-prem, maybe they start pulling in OpenShift,
or Kubernetes on-premises, start refactoring into microservices and cloud native based applications,
and they start having containers for that web interface application. Now if they want to they
can start porting those assets to the cloud and take advantage of the elasticity there to
scale up and down on demand. Number two, it's going to be faster innovation. Now with that
portability their developers can now think in a new way they can build once and deploy anywhere.
So that chatbot experience they built for the mobile backend they're going to be able to
readily port that to the on-premise experience to the web user interface experience, the legacy app
if they modernize it to kind of container-based architecture. So that's one of the key advantages
their developers are going to benefit from faster innovation, reduce time to value, faster go to
market by taking advantage of the industry's best, you know DevOps and agile practices. So,
that's a key part about a hybrid cloud is faster innovation. And finally, as we mentioned before on
the security front with that standardized layer of that OpenShift or Kubernetes that container-based
environment across the board. You're going to have consistency for things like pushing out
compliance policies to these multiple environments and that's going to be critical here to make sure
you have that kind of secure and consistent approach across these multiple environments.
Now in the interest of standardization and standardization across the board
and having that kind of consistent layer. Imagine if you could handle all of these
layers, right, infrastructure foundation and solutions all from a single say public cloud
environment. That means extending the public cloud to not just on-premises environment but
maybe even other clouds and the edge. Well that's when we're starting to get
into the concept of Distributed Cloud, so I urge you to check out my video on that.
Now with Hybrid Cloud it's going to be paramount that you take a unified and open approach to truly
set yourself up for success. If you enjoyed this video, have any questions be sure to drop a like
or comment below. Stay tuned and follow us for more videos like this in the future. Thank you.