Hybrid Cloud Journey and Strategies

Do you want to learn about and operate OpenShift in multiple environments? If you are reading this book, we suppose that the answer is yes! But before we go into the technical details, we want to start this book by making you a proposition: any house construction starts with a foundation, right? In this book, our approach will be the same. We will start by giving you the foundation to understand and create a much stronger knowledge base – you will develop critical thinking and be able to make the best decisions for your use case.

That is why we decided to start this book by not talking about OpenShift itself yet, but by unveiling the most popular (and important!) context that it operates in: the hybrid cloud infrastructure. Therefore, in this chapter, you will be introduced to the hybrid cloud journey, challenges, dilemmas, and why many organizations are struggling with it. Knowing about these challenges from the beginning is a determinant success factor for hybrid cloud adoption.

Transforming an IT business so that it's agile and scalable but is also stable is a must-have nowadays, but that is not a simple step; instead, it is a journey from one star to another in the vast outer space of IT that currently surrounds us. However, why do we need those changes? Why is the market adopting the cloud massively and so rapidly? We'll discuss that shortly!

It is a changing world!

We are living in the age of fast changes! 10 years ago, most of the current big tech companies did not exist or were just small startups; several technologies that we have today also were only known within university research groups, such as 3D printing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, 5G, edge computing, and others – and there is much more to come! Technologies like the ones mentioned previously are becoming more popular and will create several demands that do not exist today, new job positions, and far more changes.

In this rapidly changing world, some new needs became important. Most companies were forced to change to be able to release new software and versions much faster than before, quickly scale resources, and have a global presence with responsive applications.

It was in this context that the public cloud providers have emerged with great success. However, several organizations that made huge investments in the cloud are experiencing some challenges. In a study conducted by IDG in 2020, among big companies in different industries and geographies, 40% of the respondents stated that controlling cloud costs is the biggest challenge when taking full advantage of it. This research has also shown data privacy and security as big obstacles. We will walk through some of these challenges in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Main challenges of the public cloud
• How a hybrid cloud strategy helps mitigate these challenges
• How containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift help to implement the hybrid cloud
• OpenShift options
• Types of OpenShift installations
• Additional tools to support hybrid cloud adoption