Cloud computing is a versatile technology that offers different types of services and consumption models. I will list the main types of cloud computing models and service delivery models here:

• Cloud computing types:
  • Public Cloud: Cloud services provided by a third-party provider over the internet that can be accessed by anyone who pays for them
  • Private Cloud: Cloud services that are dedicated to a single organization and are not shared with any other organizations
  • Hybrid Cloud: A combination of both public and private cloud services that work together as a single system
  • Multi Cloud: Using multiple cloud providers to fulfill different cloud computing needs
• Service delivery models:
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Cloud computing infrastructure (such as servers, storage, and networking) that is provided as a service to customers
  • Software as a Service (SaaS): Cloud-based applications that are provided as a service to customers and are accessed over the internet
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): A cutting-edge platform that empowers developers to create, evaluate, and launch applications without the need to manage complex infrastructure

Here is an illustration of the cloud computing model and the service delivery model:

Figure 1.1 – Cloud computing model and service delivery model

The different cloud computing and cloud service delivery models offer different levels of performance, security, and cost-effectiveness. The public cloud model and the SaaS model are undoubtedly the most popular and widely adopted cloud computing and service delivery models, respectively. The following are the advantages of the public cloud and SaaS service model:

• Scalability
• Cost effectiveness
• Auto updates and reduced maintenance
• Flexibility

Organizations of all sizes and industries appreciate the convenience of adjusting their resources based on demand and only paying for what they use.

Leading public cloud service providers and SaaS offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Salesforce, respectively, have seen significant growth in recent years, catering to the needs of small start-ups and large enterprises alike.

However, it’s important to consider that both models come with their fair share of drawbacks, and depending on an organization’s background and goals, there can be differing views on the cloud.

While some visionary leaders are confident in the cloud’s potential and are willing to invest heavily to offset rising cloud costs through product growth, others see cloud costs as a significant threat to their company’s sustainability. For them, the fear of losing valuation due to soaring cloud expenses is a constant worry.

When approached with the right strategy, the cloud can offer numerous benefits to organizations. Not only does it enable better management of IT costs but it can also promote business growth by streamlining automation and reducing time to market.

However, it’s important to note that each organization’s approach to cloud adoption may vary in order to achieve the best results. One common mistake is when IT management treats cloud adoption as simply another IT system upgrade or uses a one-size-fits-all approach.

Designing a successful cloud infrastructure requires careful planning and foresight. While we can’t always predict future needs, it’s crucial to design with agility in mind, allowing applications to adapt quickly to meet evolving client demands while still maintaining cost-effectiveness.

The public cloud’s pay-as-you-go offerings can be enticing, but for various reasons such as security, intellectual property, and cost of ownership, organizations need to preserve their existing workloads and assets in private data centers.

These factors, along with the growing use of edge computing, make a hybrid cloud a necessary solution to meet current and future needs. But before diving into the hybrid cloud, it’s important to dispel a common misconception.

Some organizations may run certain workloads on public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure while running other workloads in their private data centers. While these workloads are running in both public and private cloud environments, this hosting setup is not truly a hybrid cloud. Instead, these environments are isolated silos.

A true hybrid cloud is about creating a consistent platform across multiple environments.

According to the Gartner Glossary, “hybrid cloud computing refers to policy-based and coordinated service provisioning, use, and management across a mixture of internal and external cloud services.”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines hybrid cloud as “the cloud infrastructure [which] is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).” [Source: NIST SP 800-145]

In our words, a hybrid cloud is a pool of computing power, storage, and services that is available from multiple environments, including the following:

• More than one public cloud
• More than one private cloud
• Private and public cloud combination

The ratio of consumption between private and public clouds varies based on the industry you’re in, and it evolves as per compliance needs and time.

Variations in the hybrid cloud – homogeneous and heterogeneous

Variations in the hybrid cloud are entirely possible. You can have the following:

• Homogeneous hybrid cloud
• Heterogeneous hybrid cloud

Choosing between these two is based on your needs and strategy.

When you run the same technology stack in both public and private clouds, it’s homogeneous. Traditionally, a single software vendor, such as Red Hat or VMware, provides a software stack including the operating system, hypervisor, and management layers for both clouds.

But when you run different components from different vendors and integrate them, that would be a heterogeneous cloud. You would have public cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, and private cloud capabilities would come from Red Hat, VMware, and so on, and would be integrated with the public cloud at different levels.

Both come with pros and cons. While homogeneous can bring ease of usage but vendor lock-in, heterogeneous can provide more control and some complexity. You will want to consider various aspects before choosing which one you would like to implement:

• How much control you would like to have architecturally
• IT skills in your organization
• Cost and resources

Ultimately, it’s about the appropriate platform for your respective applications. Organizations are looking at the cloud from economics, security, and use case points of view.

It is not always possible to move every workload to the public cloud. Organizations are also mindful of losing control of data and applications. Also, moving everything to the public cloud would mean that organizations are limited to the capabilities of the public cloud and costs can go out of control.

A hybrid cloud, on the other hand, will have resources distributed across on-premises, private, and public cloud environments.

This means a balanced approach where organizations get the speed and scale of the public cloud with the security and cost-effectiveness of the private cloud.

Because of the benefits the hybrid cloud brings and organizations’ requirements, we are witnessing offerings by the public cloud that accommodate existing investments in private data centers. Some examples include VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware on Azure, and SAP on Google Cloud.

Many enterprises want to port on-premises virtual machines to the public cloud. The following diagram, taken from AWS, is a high-level component architecture reflecting VMware Cloud on AWS:

Figure 1.2 – VMware architecture on AWS

Not only that, but public cloud providers have also built extensions that push cloud solutions to organizations’ private data centers. For example, AWS Outposts provides a hybrid experience by extending the AWS infrastructure, services, and APIs to on-premises in a fully managed offering. Google Anthos, Azure Stack, are also similar offerings by cloud providers:

Figure 1.3 – AWS Outposts for on-premises

On a heterogeneous hybrid cloud, we have seen technologies and platforms from Red Hat, Pivotal Cloud Foundry (acquired by VMware), Nutanix, and so on that provide abstraction layers and create hybrid environments across distinct technology platforms.

Making public and private clouds work together should not be an afterthought. Create a comprehensive plan that accounts for applications, automation, management, and technology stack.

Increasing footprint

In terms of stats, Gartner reckons that “by 2026 cloud spending is forecasted to exceed $1 trillion USD worldwide, exceeding all other IT markets. The drivers for this healthy state of affairs include cloud variations (such as hybrid IT and multiclouds. By 2020, 75% of organizations will have deployed a multicloud environments), which are now at the center of where the cloud hype currently is.”

Enterprises adopt different clouds because no one size fits all:

Figure 1.4 – Multi-cloud adoption by enterprises

This also brings in interesting questions that every architect and developer working in enterprise should try and find an answer to. Do you know which different clouds are adopted in your company and what percentage of applications in your organizations are portable and can run almost anywhere?

From various trends and reports, it is clear that companies looking at their future are choosing the hybrid cloud to take advantage of existing on-premises investments and the public cloud’s scalability. A hybrid cloud provides the best of both worlds by giving the control and ability to innovate. This can be complex and thus organizations need a strategy to determine which workloads will reside where.

Hybrid cloud use cases

Hybrid cloud has emerged as a popular solution for organizations looking to balance the benefits of public and private clouds while addressing the data security requirements, compliance needs for regulated applications, and performance and computing needs for applications running at remote edge locations. Here are four use cases that showcase the versatility and flexibility of the hybrid cloud in different industries:

• Security: A government agency uses a hybrid cloud approach to store sensitive national security data on a private cloud for maximum security while utilizing the public cloud for cost-effective data storage and processing for non-sensitive data.
• Proprietary Technology: A technology company uses a hybrid cloud approach to store and manage its proprietary software on a private cloud for maximum security and control while utilizing the public cloud for cost-effective development and testing. For example, financial service companies manage trading platforms on the private cloud for maximum control while using the public cloud for running simulations and back-testing algorithms.
• Competitive Edge: A retail company uses a hybrid cloud solution to store critical sales and customer information on a private cloud for security and compliance while utilizing the public cloud for real-time data analysis to gain a competitive edge by offering personalized customer experiences and insights.
• Telecom: A telecommunications company uses a hybrid cloud approach to securely store sensitive customer information on a private cloud while utilizing the public cloud for real-time data processing and analysis to improve network performance and customer experience. This approach helps the company maintain a competitive edge in the telecom sector by providing a superior network experience to its customers.

Understanding the benefits of hybrid cloud computing

A hybrid cloud provides a flexible solution. Many organizations have embraced and adopted the hybrid cloud. If we take an example of a cable company, Comcast (the world’s largest cable company), as per a technical paper published by Comcast for SCTE-ISBE, Comcast serves tens of millions of customers and hosts hundreds of tenants in eight regions and three public clouds. This is a great testimony of using a hybrid cloud for mission-critical workloads that need to run at scale.

Hybrid cloud is more popular than ever and some of the reasons that organizations are adopting a hybrid cloud are as follows:

• Time to market: With choices available to your IT teams to leverage appropriate resources as needed by use case, new applications and services can be launched quickly.
• Manage costs: Hybrid cloud helps you with optimizing and consuming resources efficiently. Make use of your current investments in existing infrastructure and when needed to scale, burst the workloads in the public cloud.
• Reduced lock-in: Going into the cloud may be appealing, but once in and when costs start to rise and eat the bottom line of the organization, it would be another costly proposition to reverse-migrate some of your applications from the public cloud. A hybrid cloud allows you to run anywhere and reduces your lock-in.
• Gaining a competitive advantage: In the competitive world of business, relying solely on public cloud technologies can put you at a disadvantage. To stay ahead of the competition, it’s important to maintain control over and ownership of cutting-edge technologies. This way, you can build and grow your business in an increasingly competitive environment.

For example, consider a telecommunications company that offers mobile services. By investing in and owning the latest advancements in wireless technology, the company can differentiate itself from other providers and offer a more seamless, high-speed network experience to its customers. This could result in more loyal customers and a stronger market position, giving the company a competitive edge in the telecommunications industry.

• Flexibility: With common operating systems and a hybrid cloud, you can run applications on any infrastructure or cloud.

A hybrid cloud is a great option when your organization is looking to benefit from the best of different computing worlds, and by adopting an open architecture, open source technologies, and vendor-agnostic solutions, you can increase your preparedness for hybrid and unseen future needs.

To benefit from a hybrid cloud, it’s important to have consistency and standardization while using distinct combinations. This can be achieved through the following:

• Abstraction: Different clouds become hybrid when your applications are abstracted from underlying infrastructure and connectivity is seamless to a great degree.
• Portability: A hybrid cloud should offer portability across environments.
• Unified management: Enforcing policies at scale across different clouds and environments is important to ensure standardization and compliance. A hybrid cloud needs unified management, orchestration, and security.

Your applications can reap significant benefits from such a setup where UI/UX runs on a public cloud and applications and databases run on a private cloud to comply with security and compliance needs or to manage costs.

When setting up the strategy for a hybrid cloud, key things to consider include the following:

• Operating system: A consistent operating system across clouds acts as a foundation. It provides the ability to host, manage, and monitor applications anywhere using a single set of tools.
• Application categorization and rationalization: Build an inventory of applications and categorize them according to the functionality they serve. Determine what to do with these applications. In the upcoming sections, we will explore the R framework to categorize applications.
• Automation: An assembly line that functions without much intervention is a must to take full advantage of the cloud. The automated creation of test environments, continuous integration, and continuous delivery is a must to increase operational efficiency.
• Data-driven approach: Data has traditionally lived in data centers. In the digital era, your customers demand insights and experiences in real time, and thus computing needs to be where your data is. It’s the next stage of digital transformation, which takes data closer to the users who consume and create it. Determine where you need a computing pool and design your hybrid cloud around your data needs.
• Management: To enforce policies and reduce operational overhead, unified management is strategic for a hybrid cloud.
• Technology partner: A skills gap is the biggest hurdle, and it is very hard to attract talent and fill the skills gap. By partnering with experienced software vendors, organizations can benefit from their best practices and deliver hybrid clouds.

We discussed setting up the strategy for a hybrid cloud so that organizations can get the best of both public and private clouds. Organizations choose a hybrid cloud to deliver agility and meet business demands. However, for some industries, compliance and regulations are the primary reasons for a hybrid cloud instead of a unique cloud provider. Let’s also look at some of the compliance requirements in our next section.

Regulations and compliance are driven by government and external factors. To comply with laws, policies, and regulations, organizations have to work to adopt and implement compliance controls.

With HIPAA in healthcare, PCI-DSS, and GLBA in financials, FISMA for US Federal Agencies, and HACCP for the food and beverage industry, you may need to factor compliance needs into your design and architecture.

The terms of your service-level agreement (SLA) should also be consistent with compliance rules, such as the following:

• Backup and data recovery
• Security responsibility
• Data retention limitations
• System availability and reliability

Public cloud vendors are responsible for the physical security of the infrastructure, but many organizations need to do their own firewalls and patching and manage access privileges.

With hybrid cloud solutions, organizations can get the best of both worlds, where the public cloud is for non-regulated data while regulated information lives in the private cloud. The control that the hybrid cloud provides mitigates the risks with data residence regulations.

Take an example from the healthcare industry, in which you need to comply with the HIPAA and other standards. Your goal should be to proactively prevent, detect, and mitigate security threats.

You should consider the following implementations for streamlined compliance:

• Centralized web console: A console to administer, patch, provision, and manage your operating environment.
• Monitor and prevent configuration drift: On-demand and periodic checks to determine any drift from the baseline of the system. You need up-to-date protection against new threats and vulnerabilities.
• Automated security: Implement a system based on HIPAA policies and conduct vulnerability scans, and generate reports.

We looked at how compliance and legal requirements can bring constraints that you need to consider during the design and implementation phase. Mostly, your compliance requirements are non-negotiable, and thus having strategy and tooling that makes it easier for your application teams to implement for compliance and audit teams to review for compliance is important. We will now look at the importance of automating security in your organization.

When adopting a hybrid cloud, your workloads can deploy in a range of environments – bare metal, virtual machine, or public clouds – and thus security becomes more complex.

The growth of heterogeneous environments will increase the risk and make manual compliance monitoring almost impossible.

The application teams, infrastructure teams, and security teams of different environments work within their own boundaries and zones leaving a blind side to the vulnerabilities.

With growing footprints and the nature of distributed systems and teams, automation is the only way to prevent inconsistent patching and configurations. Automation helps with the rapid implementation of continuous security and day 2 security operations.

Also, having an enterprise-wide security strategy helps. By bringing a consistent strategy, automation becomes easier and thus you can have an assembly line model where software is delivered at scale in a secure manner. By automatically patching the software, your software and software supply chain can be trusted.

Automation needs to come at different levels. Let’s look at them:

• Operating system (OS): Having a hardened OS as per compliance and performing patch management protects the OS from viruses, malware, and remote hacker intrusions. It is important to keep the OS safe by using techniques such as antivirus software, endpoint protection, patch updates, traffic monitoring, and firewalls, and by providing the least privileges.
• Provisioning of systems: System provisioning is a repeated task and is a great candidate for automation. Integrated IT Service Management (ITSM) – for example, ServiceNow – to provision systems in pre-defined secure ways by running playbooks is key to achieving automation.
• Workflow management: Workflows or pipelines can build a software factory where your applications have to pass security gates at the time of building. Before deployment and during packaging, your application components go through scanning and are key to DevSecOps.

You can start with iterative steps and start automating your daily tasks to secure your stack. Security at every step and every layer is important to keep your organization safe and mitigate your risk of misconfiguration and attacks. Now, let’s look at how to enable your applications for adopting a hybrid cloud.

The inventory and complexity of applications can make it hard to determine how and where to start your cloud migration process.

To take advantage of cloud capabilities and prepare your business to transform digitally, you need to have a good assessment in place for your workloads and come up with a decision matrix to decide the future of the workloads.

Having a framework can help you navigate through the complexities and come up with a blueprint for guidelines that your organization needs to follow.

Having a framework and migration factory, as depicted in the following figure, helps to realize a hybrid cloud in an accelerated way:

Figure 1.5 – Accelerate to a hybrid cloud by setting a migration factory

Using the 6-R framework is a very effective way to determine the initial steps for cloud migration. Let’s look at what each R means and stands for. The first two Rs are for Retire and Retain. These two strategies are for applications that may not be as strategic to the future of your organization. Let’s look at these in a bit more detail:

• Retire: This is about retiring or decommissioning applications that are not needed, either now or in the near future. This can be looked upon as a great opportunity to identify and turn off certain applications that do not produce enough Return on Investment (ROI) for business. By retiring such applications, you can focus on services that are more needed and produce value.
• Retain: This is about maintaining the current footprint. It may be because you cannot get rid of it but also do not see any huge benefit by migrating such applications to the cloud. A certain portion of your portfolio will fall in this category because of security, ROI, or technical stack usage reasons.

Now that we have talked about two of the Rs that may address your non-strategic applications, let’s look at the other four Rs and understand them in a bit more detail:

• Rehost/Relocate: The most commonly used strategy in organizations is rehosting. Even prior to the cloud, application owners and IT teams face certain roadblocks with current platforms because of cost or technical gaps and thus end up rehosting. This can be considered a simple migration that can bring significant benefits. It is also known as lift and shift. As the name implies, you lift/export your application from the current platform and deploy it on a new platform and make an immediate impact, and get ROIs.

A few examples could be migrating your on-premises virtual machine to VMware on Cloud or to KubeVirt (KubeVirt makes it possible to run a virtual machine in a Kubernetes-managed container platform).

Rehosting may not turn your applications cloud-native or provide benefits as replatforming/refactoring does, but given less resistance and friction, the cost is less and returns are realized quickly.

Also, relocating (also known as hypervisor-level lift and shift) refers to the process of moving infrastructure to the cloud without the need to purchase new hardware, rewrite apps, or modify existing operations. This term is commonly used in the context of the VMware Cloud on AWS offering.

• Replatform: This can be looked upon as a further add-on to rehosting. For some applications, it is important to make additional optimizations and perform some tweaking and coding to get benefits from cloud capabilities such as elasticity, scale, self-healing, and so on.
• Refactor: This strategy is more fitting when certain applications are in need of extensive improvements to serve performance, availability, and reliability. Application teams have to do extensive design thinking and come up with an architecture that adheres to new non-functional requirements. This can be a time-consuming task and yet the most beneficial strategy, and it needs skill sets and expertise to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities.
• Repurchase: The last strategy is about moving on from existing vendors or technology and adopting new vendors. It means terminating your existing subscriptions and licenses for cost, security, or technical reasons – for example, giving up your on-premises Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system to adopt a cloud-based SaaS from Salesforce or Workday. Another example is moving or reducing the usage of proprietary databases and adopting cloud-based databases.

The following table is a quick summary of the 6-R framework and how each strategy impacts time and costs and brings business benefits:

Figure 1.6 – 6-R framework and benefits

We talked about the 6-R framework, which could be very handy to determine the fate of your applications and your approach toward them. It is not meant to be mutually exclusive and you can use or customize this framework as your circumstances demand. Let’s look at different tools and technologies that could help in implementing the 6-R framework.

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.

By now, you should have an overview of the hybrid cloud and its benefits. We also covered very useful and important tools that help with adopting the hybrid cloud in an accelerated manner.

We recommended that enterprises choose a common operating environment and modernize their applications to benefit from cloud capabilities. Similarly, using a common set of tools across on-premises and clouds can help you approach your public cloud as an extension of an on-premises data center.

By going to provided links/references and following instructions, you can download tools that can help you assess your application and define a migration strategy. You can also try open source tools such as Ansible for building your automation.

In the next chapters, we will learn about some vital technologies using use cases from 5G telecommunications.

• Hybrid Cloud Glossary from Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/hybrid-cloud-computing
• SAP on Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap
• VMware on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/
• Azure VMware Solution: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-vmware/#product-overview
• Red Hat OpenShift: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift
• Google Anthos: https://cloud.google.com/anthos
• VMWare Tanzu: https://tanzu.vmware.com/tanzu
• Azure Stack: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack
• AWS Outposts: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/