Hybrid and Multicloud Management

Strategy 1: Create a Unified Infrastructure Control Plane

A fundamental challenge when it comes to managing infrastructure across a hybrid cloud is that every cloud—public or private—is unique. This strategy digs deeper into the challenges of hybrid cloud operations, suggests a plan of action for addressing those challenges, and looks at the landscape of possible solutions.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Management Challenges

Although things may be conceptually similar between different cloud environments, at a practical level there’s no standardization. Knowing what compute instance or what storage type to use for a workload in one cloud doesn’t translate easily to another environment.

The fact that each cloud essentially operates as a silo causes challenges to multiply.

Management Interfaces Differ from One Cloud to the Next

The tools for selecting, deploying, and configuring infrastructure services are different from one cloud to the next, and expertise in one cloud doesn’t mean you’ll be immediately efficient in another. Given the rapid growth in infrastructure and other services in each of the major public clouds over the past few years, just keeping up to date with the capabilities and best practices for a single cloud platform has become a challenge.

Siloed Cloud Management Teams

Siloed cloud management is almost certainly why most enterprises have separate teams dedicated to each cloud platform they use, as illustrated in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. A typical hybrid cloud ...