Hybrid cloud management challenges

One of the important challenges in running a cloud infrastructure is management. This challenge is compounded if you also have a heterogeneous environment of on-premise virtualized infrastructure. Let's take a look at some of the most common hybrid cloud management challenges companies face in day-to-day operations:

• Centralized management: Most companies will already have a virtualized infrastructure and also be using either both private and public clouds or at least one of them. Hence, they will have management tools for each of these infrastructures, for example, a management tool for VMware, another for a public cloud (such as Amazon Web Services), and then maybe a tool for managing a private cloud (such as OpenStack). The challenge is in managing them separately.
• Life cycle management: Life cycle management involves automation of tasks such as requesting resources, approval, provisioning, customization, reconfiguration, and finally retiring the resources. A lack of life cycle management capabilities can lead to losing track and continuing to run needless resources, causing management and cost overhead. This results from the need to manage individual silos.
• Capacity management: One of the reasons for which companies move to the cloud, especially a hybrid one, is to be able to meet the sudden demand of resources from a public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The challenge is to know when to cross over and provision new resources through automation.
• Chargeback: Being able to accurately collect utilization data and charge back a tenant or internal department is another challenge that most companies face. It involves performing a manual process or the use of a vendor-specific tool, which again results in manual aggregation in the case of a heterogeneous environment. Companies face the lack of a unified platform for chargeback.
• Governance: With self-service being one of the main reasons for cloud adaptability, governance becomes key to hassle-free, automated commissioning and decommissioning of resources. Also, in the case of a hybrid cloud, the challenge is to make it work seamlessly across environments instead of separate governance policies for virtual and the cloud.
• Orchestration: Orchestration templates are vendor-specific and fail to work across providers. The challenge is a platform from where an orchestration template will be able to deploy resources across virtual and cloud environments.
• Integration: A diverse IT environment consisting of physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures running in different types of hardware, stack, and platform in different geographical locations makes integration of services difficult.
• Security and Compliance: This is a challenge that always figures at the top of the list. Administrators need to ensure that compliance is met when provisioning resources across different types of infrastructures, users do not have more than the required permissions, and resources are provisioned with a set standard or configuration.
• Unified analytics: Having a unified view of resources, their consumption across environments, and providers to monitor; viewing trends; checking performance; and forecasting are other challenges that businesses face with a hybrid cloud deployment.
• External cloud: Another challenge with hybrid cloud deployments is integration with external or public clouds for workload deployment. In most cases, this is managed separately in a manual way, or it is sometimes scripted, but still it requires a lot of hassles. Presenting external clouds as an extension of your data center or private cloud is still a challenge.