Most businesses are just beginning to hit their stride with cloud computing. Building a hybrid cloud can be complex and sophisticated work for businesses professionals, and the responsibility falls on developers and IT staff to educate the rest of the business and implement the new programs.
For businesses that don’t want to migrate all resources to the cloud, hybrid clouds offer a balanced option by allowing some resources to be deployed in the public cloud and others in a private cloud that’s protected by a firewall. However, hybrid clouds take a lot of work to build and maintain, and many organizations are still quite new to their cloud journey. Learn more about different models of hybrid cloud computing to determine if this concept meets your needs.
Four Approaches to Hybrid Cloud Computing
Hybrid clouds provide more security than public clouds, so developers can deploy sensitive applications on storage servers without going through a public cloud. There are several different models of cloud data storage, and learning more about the subtle differences can help you determine which may be right for you.
1. Static Placement: This model allows you to allocate some resources strictly to private clouds and others strictly to public clouds. It can be useful if you have compliance requirements regarding data management.
2. Assisted Replication: While you allocate some resources to a public cloud and others to a private cloud, you can replicate services present in one on the other if needed.
3. Auto Migration: Here, resources migrate from public to private clouds (and vice versa) on their own.
4. Dynamic Migration: This allows for more fluid migration between public and private clouds, mirroring the setup of a virtual OS.
Implications & What Hybrid Cloud Computing Means for Developers
Because hybrid clouds are so new, it’s difficult to determine the full implications for IT staff and web developers. In general, hybrid clouds have a similar security, user interface and focus on delivering a service through an abstracted layer as their public cousins.
Some vendors offer a hybrid model that allows users to utilize a public cloud deployment, a private cloud deployment and an in-house dedicated server with automatic load balancing among all three. It’s the most flexible option out there and is useful for industries with tight security restrictions, like healthcare and government.
Lessons for Developers
IT staff members evaluating hybrid cloud models should focus foremost on the services providers, and less on the data storage capacities. Different hybrid models can be more attractive, depending on whether a business values flexibility or security more. At present, the static placement is dominant, with very little automation currently offered by most private and public cloud computing service providers. From an IT perspective, deploying an application or loading data onto a cloud means that data won’t migrate until you make it.
Utilizing OpenStack API for Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
The OpenStack project provides open source software that you can use to create either public or private cloud infrastructures. This initiative offers developers the ability to set up their own simple and scalable in-house cloud. OpenStack Block Storage offers open source, persistent block level storage that interfaces with OpenStack clouds. Block storage is ideal for performance-sensitive items including database storage, expandable file systems or raw, block level file storage.
Hybrid clouds represent a middle ground that can be quite freeing, especially for organizations that have concerns regarding security and privacy of public cloud data. Customize the perfect fit between your existing technology and the cloud; then use the flexible and easy OpenStack API to launch your personalized hybrid cloud.
