The hybrid cloud architecture combines multiple environments across public cloud, private cloud and sometimes on-premises infrastructure for a single managed IT infrastructure. A hybrid cloud infrastructure can be implemented by an enterprise hosting legacy applications on premise and interacting with public cloud services via APIs. However, this may not be the best use case for hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Today microservices-based architecture is at the heart of hybrid cloud models. Microservices are an approach whereby an application is broken down into smaller components or services for easier deployment. As opposed to SOA services, these microservices have own stack and can be easily deployed in containers.
Containers are lightweight which allows each container to contain only a microservice (and dependencies). This kind of virtualization gives microservices the capability to take full advantage of cloud resources, as elasticity and flexibility are vital in this kind setting. As containerization has emerged, hybrid clouds have become more valuable. Today portability of workloads and automatic deployment of services on the cloud environment are no longer difficult.
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When it comes to containerization, the emphasis has changed from physical placement and connections to the capability of migrating operations without hindrance from one area to another. Thus, picking a private or public cloud for an application no longer has to be a permanent choice. In case things don’t work out, containers make it effortless to move workloads between spaces, scale up and down, or even have multiple copies of the same service functioning in different places. Many considerations must be taken into account when designing and using a hybrid cloud architecture, such as business objectives, the existing technology stack, digital transformation objectives and security. Keeping this complexity in mind, ops tools can help to create a centralized, coherent and expandable approach.
Rather than moving all of the monolithic app to cloud, which is both time-consuming and possibly unneeded, it is better to choose one or two services that are not hindered by compliance or in need of quick performance improvement. The most advanced approach of separating all system components into single-responsibility microservices that are modular and have an independent path to production as well as containerizing them. Using a unified control plane, enterprise operations teams can manage their cloud landscape across environments. In addition to workload scheduling and orchestration, it supports continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, logging, telemetry, and federated security for cluster management.
Additionally, the concept of micro segmentation can be used to build and demarcate security levels between services running within an environment by segmenting the environment into different logical security segments to define access control policies for each service and workload.
