Designing and Building a Hybrid Cloud

Chapter 5. Designing Your Hybrid Cloud: Public Clouds, CSPs, and SaaS

Once you’ve chosen your cloud operating system and on-premises infrastructure strategy, it’s time to choose the specific cloud environments that will be a part of your hybrid cloud. The goal is to select cloud providers that complement the decisions you’ve already made:

• Choose public clouds and CSPs compatible with your cloud operating system.

• Compatibility is less important for SaaS providers where you will simply consume the software service.

Choosing providers based on compatibility provides a common operating environment and more seamless integration between environments, enabling developers to use resources across your hybrid cloud as necessary without extensive retooling, and allowing on-premises applications to more easily take advantage of cloudbursting during periods of peak load.

This chapter provides additional guidance on choosing cloud partners. In some cases, you may want to establish relationships even though your needs are not immediate. This will allow you to move more quickly if a timetable needs to be accelerated, or you need to respond swiftly to a new opportunity or competitive threat.

Choosing Public Clouds and CSPs

To choose the best providers for your needs, you’ll need to carefully navigate the evolving cloud landscape. As described in Chapter 3, this requires mature processes for deciding which applications and services to run where.

Beyond integration with your chosen cloud operating ...