Hybrid and Multicloud Solutions

Chapter 3. Choosing a Hybrid Cloud Solution

Connecting the private and public clouds is where many organizations stop. The benefits of going further are obvious, but the added complexity can make creating a true hybrid cloud seem too difficult. Although there are solutions available, it can be difficult to find a robust solution offering the necessary level of support and advanced capabilities. This chapter helps with the decision with respect to choosing a hybrid cloud solution that can make deployment of a hybrid cloud much easier.

Examining Capabilities

Several capabilities are necessary in order to provide the level of service necessary in today’s modern organization. When looking at cloud-specific capabilities, these are key ingredients:

• Extensive workload support

• Advanced resource pooling

• Application-centric automation

• Connectivity across clouds

• Zero-downtime migrations

Extensive Workload Support

Cloud workloads consist of long-running services and short-lived jobs. Although both private and public clouds support both types, providing orchestration and integration for these workloads is challenging.

Best practice dictates running applications on their native platform, regardless of the underlying operating system. Doing so enables the greatest compatibility and performance for a given application. IT staff frequently support various versions of Microsoft Windows and various distributions of Linux, not to mention other Unix variants.

It is no longer uncommon to find multiple ...