Bridging the Public/Private Cloud Chasm
The cloud originated primarily as a medium for consumer services, such as email and on-line backup. As it grew and gained popularity, cloud bursting was soon touted as a way to deliver highly elastic, more cost effective, shared IT resources to enterprises that wanted to preserve their existing IT systems investments. On paper the concept is simple.
A company is able to take advantage of public clouds to handle spiky usage patterns and peak workloads without needing to invest in expensive hardware and infrastructure to meet the demand. Some examples include monthly financial reporting, Cyber Monday, or a one-time data conversion project. How can the enterprise leverage their investments in private cloud, yet take advantage of the low cost and elasticity of the public cloud?
Are public/private hybrid clouds dead or have they morphed into something different? The short answer is the enterprise has embraced hybrid cloud architectures more than ever—but in unexpected ways.
The long answer is the laws of physics get in the way of cloud bursting. It turns out that moving terabytes of data over the Internet is never going to happen instantly no matter how much Star Trek we watched. That does not mean that hybrid clouds and cloud bursting is impossible; it just means that cloud architects and application developers need to be smarter about moving workloads between public and private clouds.
Companies are leveraging public clouds to augment their internal IT systems (cloud or otherwise) by using a number of architectures and techniques.
Application development stage segmentation—A common approach is to use the public cloud for application development, which has fewer constraints and requirements, and private infrastructure for production systems. This allows for tighter controls over sensitive data and customer facing systems, yet takes advantage of the public cloud to reduce SDLC costs and provide greater flexibility.
Matching public and private cloud infrastructures—Another way to minimize the risk is to build a private cloud that matches existing public clouds. Eucalyptus offers an Amazon-clone private cloud that would be an option for a company that has already developed a significant Amazon presence but wants to take applications back in-house. Another possibility is to use public cloud services that match existing private infrastructure, such as the VMware-based services such as Bluelock or Verizon Terremark.
Creating virtual private clouds within a public cloud—Terremark’s CloudSwitch is a big proponent of the VLAN take on the public/private hybrid architecture. The big drawback to this approach is the need to add WAN optimization or other method for minimizing application migration in and out of the public cloud. It also adds yet another layer of complexity and abstraction.
All these approaches will help address the enterprise need for hybrid clouds, but there is still a dearth of tools and plenty of work to be done to make hybrid clouds completely transparent to users.
Is your company ready for a hybrid cloud? Let us know in the Comments section below.
