Evaluating available tools and technologies

Although clouds offer comparable functionalities to a certain degree, they have distinct characteristics. As each cloud, whether public or private, operates independently, your company’s IT infrastructure may face compounded challenges due to the variety of instances, networks, and storage types across different clouds.

It is practically not possible for your team, which is trained and delivering solutions on one cloud, to efficiently translate their skills into another cloud. Thus, we see organizations hiring different team members from different backgrounds and experiences to manage clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google, and private clouds.

As an enterprise, your teams are trying to make the most out of your cloud subscription. It is also in the interest of your public cloud provider to have you use all of their offerings. However, the goal should be to get the best out of the different cloud subscriptions by making them work together.

The expectations from your tenants would be to be able to request cloud resources and manage user permissions and automated controls. The tenant can request different resources at different layers, as depicted in the diagram:

Figure 1.7 – Everything as a service

You need to look at certain characteristics to make a hybrid cloud a reality:

• Common platform and operating environment: A common operating environment is needed so that when users turn toward any cloud, they have a uniform experience at the platform and operating level. This will allow users to connect and manage applications in a streamlined manner.
• Automation: In a hybrid cloud environment, automation is crucial for achieving consistent and efficient management of both public and private cloud infrastructure. Cloud-agnostic tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible provide IT teams with the ability to automate infrastructure configuration, application deployment, and ongoing management, regardless of the underlying cloud provider. These tools help organizations to standardize their operations, reduce manual errors, and ensure that their infrastructure and applications are secure, scalable, and highly available. Furthermore, when combined with GitOps, cloud-agnostic tools can help organizations to achieve a Git-centric approach to infrastructure as code, which enables them to manage their infrastructure and applications through a single source of truth and automated workflows. This provides a clear and consistent approach to managing their infrastructure, while also allowing them to take advantage of the benefits of both public and private clouds
• Implement comprehensive security: Security is complex and challenging. While the ultimate goal should be to secure at every layer, the approach should be to simplify security management. When your environments and infrastructure differ, applying the same security policy, applying patches, and changing management in different clouds becomes tedious. It would be ideal to have one tool that spans across multiple clouds. Acquiring tools to manage security and patches at a centralized and granular level across infrastructure will help accelerate cloud adoption. One such tool is OpenSCAP.

OpenSCAP, a comprehensive open source initiative, offers a robust suite of tools for seamless implementation and enforcement of Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) standards, as diligently maintained by NIST.

OpenSCAP performs vulnerability scans and validates security compliance content to generate reports. It is a great solution for fast and repeatable security.

• Unified management: A single control plane to manage the life cycle of multiple clusters agnostic to the underlying platform will be used by teams to create resources across clusters. Industry leaders in hybrid cloud management include Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware. This provides the ability to deploy applications from different sources and have a consistent experience across all clusters, manage risk and apply policies for security, and maintain governance.
• Policy and governance: Policy and governance play a crucial role in the success of a hybrid cloud strategy. A well-defined set of policies and governance frameworks helps organizations to effectively manage security, compliance, and resource allocation across multiple cloud environments. The policies need to be flexible enough to adapt to changing business requirements while ensuring that the data and applications remain secure. The governance framework helps in defining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes, leading to better alignment and coordination between different teams. Additionally, a robust governance framework ensures that the hybrid cloud strategy is aligned with the overall business objectives and goals, leading to better cost optimization, risk mitigation, and overall performance. In conclusion, policy and governance form the backbone of a successful hybrid cloud strategy, and organizations must prioritize these aspects for seamless and efficient deployment and operation of hybrid cloud solutions.
• Modernize applications: Many such tools exist that help with migration to modernize applications. One such example is the open source tool, Konveyor. Konveyor (https://www.konveyor.io/) is a suite of tools that focuses on various use cases with the target platform of Kubernetes, and prime contributors to these tools are IBM Research and Red Hat with involvement from Microsoft. It is an open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. It includes a bundle of different tools that come under the umbrella of Konveyor. The following diagram from the Konveyor website does a pretty good job of depicting different Konveyor tools:

Figure 1.8 – Konveyor and tools

Let’s briefly look at the various tools under the Konveyor umbrella:

• Konveyor Move2Kube: Replatforms applications to Kubernetes
• Konveyor Crane: Rehosts applications between Kubernetes clusters
• Konveyor Tackle: Assesses, prioritizes, and refactors applications
• Konveyor Forklift: Rehosts virtual machines to KubeVirt
• Konveyor Pelorus: Measures software delivery performance

You can go to the Konveyor website and look at demonstrations and source code and try these tools, which help to implement some of your 6R strategies.

In addition to the preceding, other solutions exist, such as the following:

• Public cloud vendor offerings: To maximize developer productivity, public cloud vendors came up with offerings such as AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, Google Anthos, and Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), which allow you to build and deploy applications as normal both on-premises and on the public cloud.
• Platform vendor offerings: Various vendors offer solutions that span public and private clouds. Certain tools from vendors such as Scalr, Cisco Cloud Center, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu Application Service provide essential tooling in this area.

As an example, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management will bring the capabilities you need for your large hybrid environment. To control your clusters and applications from a single console, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management plays a great role.

This solution provides comprehensive management, visibility, and control for your cluster and application life cycle, as well as enhanced security for your entire Kubernetes domain across multiple data centers and public clouds. It also offers compliance with industry regulations.

Because these are complementary and integrated technologies, they help with self-service and free up your IT departments.

• Kubernetes: Kubernetes (popularly known as k8s or kube) is a container orchestration platform. It is an open source technology and it came out of Google. Although initially developed by Google, the project for Kubernetes is currently under the stewardship of CNCF.

It is the de facto standard and is declarative in nature, and also an ideal foundation for a hybrid cloud. It abstracts your workload from the underlying hardware. Thus, you can use k8s to provide the same environment everywhere and run containerized applications in any location without any modification.

The flexibility to operate across any cloud and the elasticity of the cloud (as you can dynamically scale your Kubernetes clusters up or down based on workload demand) are why it is popular among organizations.

The tools and technologies that we looked upon come from various vendors, cloud providers, and the open source world. These tools help with management, provisioning, migration, optimizing, securing, and overall, helping you realize your hybrid cloud.