Has Hybrid Cloud Finally Come of Age?

Hybrid cloud continues to be a hot topic within the IT industry.

That’s pretty amazing, because it seems like we’ve been talking about the concept for an eternity. Every cloud-related study or survey shows that it remains top of mind for enterprise business leaders and IT decision-makers. Just last month, I read that 87% of enterprises have now embraced a hybrid cloud strategy.

The attraction of a hybrid cloud approach is obvious. It makes it easier to run critical applications, workloads, services, and data on (or across) the most appropriate platforms. It also makes it possible to seamlessly rebalance or move them whenever needed. That all adds up to improved agility, flexibility, productivity, and scalability.

What exactly is a hybrid cloud?

That can be a difficult question to answer, because definitions are often a little hazy.

A hybrid cloud is normally two or more cloud platforms (usually a mix of public and private clouds) combined into a single infrastructure. This consolidated environment can then be controlled by a unified set of management tools, making it possible to move the applications between platforms or build them to span multiple clouds.

However, some organizations use the term “hybrid cloud” differently. Sometimes it describes the use of multiple independent cloud platforms (either private or public or both). In this multi-cloud scenario, applications are individually deployed to the most appropriate platform for the workload to optimize performance, functionality, and cost.

However, what’s in a name? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, right? Frankly, it is how your business chooses to define “hybrid cloud” that counts. You get to choose the strategy and infrastructure that is most appropriate for your organization.

The key considerations are:

• What business advantages will your cloud strategy deliver?
• What impact will it have on economy, performance, uptime, customer experience, and competitive advantage?

Those are critical factors for all of us to ponder – especially this year. The global COVID-19 emergency is putting business efficiency, productivity, and cost even more under the microscope. More of us are working remotely and that requires a rapid adjustment to how we use edge, core, and cloud services.

Open source is smoothing the path to hybrid clouds

Cloud computing has reached such a level of maturity and acceptance that it is now an indispensable component in virtually all the IT systems we rely on every day. It has become so omnipresent that we may as well drop the “cloud” label and just call it “computing”. It is a fundamental part of the software-defined infrastructures that enables our increasingly digitalized and data-driven world.

What matters most is what we do with all the agile computing capacity and capability we now have at our disposal. Which workloads will we migrate next and how will we modernize or enhance our existing applications for a cloud environment? Even more importantly, how will we architect, build, and manage the next generation of cloud-native applications and services?

In the past, implementing hybrid clouds was incredibly difficult. This is partly because each cloud platform has subtle but significant functional differences that make hybrid management painful.

But today, collaborative open source technologies are making things a whole lot easier. Open source projects such as Linux, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry are at the heart of virtually all cloud-native computing solutions. They can be used to create a consistent environment on any cloud, making it possible to design genuine containerized cloud-native applications that are seamlessly portable across platforms. Hence, mature and enterprise-grade hybrid environments are now a reality.

If you’d like to know more, SUSECONdigital’20 is starting on May 20^th.

Hybrid and multi-cloud is one of the key themes for the event. You can hear from SUSE specialists, customers and partners on how to make the most of the latest technology and strategies for your business.

Why not sign up for one of the following free online sessions:

• AWS, Azure, GCP? No problem! Put hybrid and multi-cloud applications to work on any hyper-scale
• An introduction to Stratos: The hybrid cloud management solutions
• Managing containerized applications in multi-cloud environments
• SUSE Cloud Solutions roadmap
• SUSE Container and Application Platforms: Future Vision and Roadmap
• SUSE’s infrastructure management roadmap: Managing Hybrid IT infrastructures from Edge to the Core to the Clouds
• Living on the edge: SUSE Enterprise Storage for multi-cloud environments

Thanks for reading!  More info on hybrid cloud solutions from SUSE can be found here:   https://www.suse.com/solutions/managing-hybrid-clouds/

Jeff Reser

@JeffReserNC