Prädiktives maschinelles Lernen entwickeln, mit Flink | Workshop am 18. Dezember | Jetzt registrieren
Cloud adoption has shown explosive growth over the last five to ten years. In fact, 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service, and the public cloud service market is expected to reach $773 billion in 2024. With increased efficiency, scalability, and cost savings, more organizations are adopting cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud technology. In this guide, we’ll cover what hybrid cloud computing is, how it works, its pros and cons, the types of hybrid cloud services, and how to choose a provider.
A hybrid cloud is an environment that employs two or more separate cloud infrastructures (on-premises, private, or public)—sharing data, resources, or services to operate as one standardized technology.
Businesses use hybrid clouds to reduce costs, minimize risk, and extend their existing capabilities by balancing workloads between private and public clouds.
Hybrid cloud architecture is made up of a combination of any two of the environments listed below:
A hybrid cloud combines resources and services from multiple environments, such as on-premises data centers, and public or private clouds. This approach requires integration, orchestration, and coordination to share, shift, and synchronize data quickly and efficiently.
In traditional hybrid cloud setups, companies transformed portions of their on-premises data centers into private cloud infrastructures to connect them with public cloud environments like AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, or Microsoft Azure via pre-packaged solutions or enterprise middleware. They also used unified management tools for centralized monitoring and resource management.
Today, hybrid cloud architecture focuses on data and application portability across various environments. Modern applications use cloud-native technologies, such as microservices architecture and containerization, which enable lightweight, scalable, and secure application deployment.
Here are a few practical examples of how hybrid cloud infrastructure is used across various industries:
Hybrid cloud infrastructures are well-suited for numerous industries, including:
Hybrid cloud environments also support edge computing, which moves workloads and data closer to where computing is done. Infrastructure virtualization, or “infrastructure as code,” allows developers to create cloud environments on demand using any available computing resources, which helps improve performance and reduce latency.
According to Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud Report for 2024, 73 percent of businesses have chosen a hybrid cloud solution.
Here are some of the key benefits of hybrid cloud computing:
One key benefit of a hybrid cloud solution is control. Hybrid cloud solutions provide a mix of advantages that come from public and private servers.
This allows you to separate sensitive information from less critical data. Since a portion of the network-enabled application remains private, you can store your most sensitive data on managed hardware, giving your internal IT staff control over critical operations.
Hybrid cloud is cost effective because it allows you to quickly organize, use, and scale data according to your needs. You only pay for the extra resources when you need them. You will also save on the maintenance costs, since the service provider handles the cost of hardware and software.
Hybrid solutions help you avoid vendor lock-in by removing the dependency on public cloud architectures. With hybrid cloud infrastructure, you always have a place to move your data if public cloud requirements become unsustainable.
Hybrid cloud infrastructure allows your business to scale the resources up and down based on demand. Cloud solutions continually respond to your business’s needs, providing unlimited resources based on usage.
The hybrid cloud system is a great business continuity solution. It replicates your data and provides data insurance in case of any kind of unexpected disaster.
Hybrid cloud solutions are meant to cater to your organization’s needs and can be optimized to speed up processes. Since the system isn’t entirely public, your IT department can reduce latency so that data will be transferred faster and easier.
Hybrid clouds can be added sequentially to your business processes for a smooth transfer.
Organizations can leverage the hybrid cloud to combine the strengths of both public and private cloud environments for multiple scenarios. Here are some common use cases:
Untested Workloads
Testing is a crucial component during app development processes. A hybrid cloud solution allows you to test the app quickly and at a relatively low cost. This way, you can avoid capital expenditure associated with launching in a private cloud.
Cloudbursting
Organizations often need extra resources for applications during peak utilization timeframes, such as shopping seasons, holidays, and other peak usage moments. By using a hybrid cloud environment, organizations can dynamically configure, provision, and migrate workloads to the public cloud without needing to purchase new hardware, and then scale back quickly.
Disaster Recovery
Typically, organizations keep a different physical location to transfer the workloads in case of disaster. Leveraging a public cloud allows you to narrow or completely exclude the demand for that physical footprint. In this case, an organization can keep its production setting in a private cloud and a recovery setting in a public cloud, ready to make the switch in case of a catastrophic event.
Regulatory Requirements
Hybrid cloud solutions help meet regulatory requirements while optimizing performance. Compliance regulations might restrict your organization's ability to move your application data out of the country. However, this requirement may not impede your ability to move parts of your app, like stateless web servers, to run in a public cloud to increase performance.
While hybrid cloud computing offers numerous benefits, it also presents challenges that organizations must address to ensure successful implementation and operation.
Here are some of the key challenges:
Complexity in Integration and Management
Integrating and managing a hybrid cloud environment is inherently complex. Organizations must ensure seamless integration between on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and public cloud platforms. This requires sophisticated management tools and processes to monitor, control, and optimize the hybrid cloud ecosystem.
Security and Compliance
Organizations need to implement robust security measures to protect data as it moves between different environments. Additionally, compliance with regulatory requirements can be more complex when data is distributed across multiple platforms, each with its own set of security protocols and compliance standards.
Data Management and Governance
Organizations using hybrid cloud must implement policies and tools for data synchronization, backup, and recovery to prevent data loss and ensure data availability. Proper data governance is essential to maintain control over data access and usage across different environments.
Network Latency and Bandwidth
Hybrid cloud environments rely heavily on network connectivity to transfer data between on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms. Network latency and bandwidth limitations can impact the performance of applications and services. It requires high-speed, reliable network infrastructure to minimize latency and ensure efficient data transfer.
Cost Management
While hybrid cloud solutions can offer cost savings, managing costs effectively can be challenging. Organizations need to monitor and control spending across different cloud environments to avoid unexpected expenses, which requires cost management tools and practices for optimum resource utilization
By addressing these challenges, organizations can fully leverage the benefits of hybrid cloud computing by improving operations, network performance, workload management, security, and cost control.
A few real-life examples of cloud computing include Netflix, Gmail, Facebook, Spotify, and Salesforce. All data is stored in the service provider’s cloud infrastructure, and can be accessed from any device, at any time, from anywhere, through the internet.
Popular cloud use cases include backup and recovery (Apple iCloud and Dropbox), social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram), video games (Steam), and chat applications (WhatsApp and Zoom).
Notice that none of your profile data, photos, files, games, or media has to be downloaded or manually saved, in order to save your preferences, continue where you left off, or access your information.
Regardless of the specific setup used, all hybrid cloud infrastructures have some traits in common:
Data integration: Interconnectivity is first made possible through data virtualization. A company’s data needs to be synchronized across its public cloud and non-public cloud infrastructure. To accomplish synchronization, businesses have to implement additional technical solutions to keep data consistent.
Network connections: To get the most out of your hybrid cloud, private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises infrastructure have to be connected to each other, either via the public Internet or over a private network. This network connectivity can be done in a variety of ways, including:
VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) – This type of network connectivity is the most widely used. It enables secure, encrypted connections over the Internet. Machines connected to a VPN can communicate as securely as if they were connected to a private internal network. WANs (Wide Area Networks) – A wide area network connects computers over a distance. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) – An application programming interface that allows an application to “call” a feature or functionality from another cloud service, in order to incorporate that feature or functionality into the application’s service. API calls are sent as HTTP requests, and they can either be sent over the open Internet, a VPN, or a WAN.
Dedicated cloud connectivity options are typically used If you require dedicated bandwidth and low latency.
Businesses are searching for ways to tackle the vast amounts of crucial data available in their legacy systems so that they can deploy new game-changing apps built using cloud tools. To do this, they need a steady bridge to the cloud for data to connect apps and cloud-native environments.
Apache Kafka and Confluent offer flexible deployment solutions for an uncomplicated, multi-cloud migration.
Confluent Cloud plays a vital role when migrating to the cloud, accelerating a wide range of operational tasks. It gives you quick access to cloud resources for automated provisioning of development, test, and production platforms. Another benefit is that you will be spending less money and time troubleshooting configuration changes caused by manually deployed systems and apps.
Confluent’s management tool is designed to facilitate your adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructure, regardless of whether you want to host on public cloud, private cloud, on-premise, or a combination of the three.
Don’t let a cloud migration hinder your business. Confluent simplifies cloud deployments with a hybrid cloud data pipeline, real-time data integration, and stream processing.