Until recently, the world of IT was going gaga over public cloud computing. The IT guys were blindsided by the possibilities the public clouds offered. But in 2010, when some of the IT directors blew the whistle on public clouds’ security concerns, the focus shifted to private clouds. And now we have something called ‘cloudburst’ staring right at us.
But what is a cloudburst? Cloudburst is a strategy wherein the enterprises run out of capacity on their internal cloud resources pass on the additional workload to the external resources. This ‘bursting’ of the additional workload from internal to external resources is called cloudburst.
In this arrangement, the internal cloud is the private cloud, and the external cloud is the public cloud. Public clouds charge the enterprises on pay per use basis. And the combo of public and private cloud is called a Hybrid Cloud.
Analyzing the Hybrid Cloud Services
2010 has seen a tremendous rise in the popularity of hybrid clouds. With industry heavyweights like IBM, Amazon, and VMware vying for the lion’s share in hybrid computing, enterprises have a field day. But what fuels the growing popularity and adoption of hybrids?
It’s quite obvious. Hybrid cloud, a combo of private and public clouds, offers the best of both worlds. It bundles up the advantages of both of them in one single package.
Advantages of hybrid cloud computing are as follows:
1. The enterprises have to pay for only what they use in public clouds, which means lower investment.
2. The public clouds provide good testing and development environments for applications that require scaling.
3. The private clouds in the combo address the security concerns.
4. Enterprises retain control over the database since they reside in private clouds.
5. Enterprises can run mission-critical applications on private clouds and offload the rest on the public.
How to Adopt Hybrid Clouds?
We do not deny the benefits that hybrids offer to enterprises. But there are a typical set of challenges that accompany hybrids. For many enterprises, hybrid clouds could turn out to be the best thing to happen to them. But at the same time, enterprises should be fully aware of what they have on their hands when they hop on the hybrid bandwagon.
The first point of parity is integration. Generally, private clouds and public clouds have varying APIs and management frameworks. This difference leads to integration glitches. An enterprise has to fine-tune these to reap the benefits of a hybrid.
A hybrid setup also has to account for the performance and latency issues of a public cloud. Thus, enterprises should shake hands with public cloud folks and evaluate their troubleshooting capabilities. It’s better to know your go-to person if your application goes down in the middle of the night.
In such cases having an experienced cloud application development partner like Radixweb by-your-side – saves the night.
Another crippling factor of hybrids is cloud interoperability. It’s a high possibility that your private cloud might not be interoperable with the vendor’s public cloud. Thus, enterprises should pick a cloud vendor who has a large number of partners and cloud APIs.
Managing Data During Cloudbursts
There are many approaches for dealing with cloudbursts; each have a different expense, efficiency, and architectural implications. One of them can suit your application’s specific requirements and the overall business model of your enterprise.
- Independent cluster: There are limited coordination and data-sharing criteria between the application instances running in the company and cloud data centers in this strategy. Global load balancers guide requests to either locality, but there are zero necessities to interact with the application instances that are running on the cloud – while comparing it with the ones in the enterprise’s physical data center.
- Access to consolidated data remotely: This approach is the simplest one for updating and accessing application instances, that are operating on the cloud to access a single data store instance. To determine this approach’s feasibility, one needs to analyze the pattern and the intensity of read and writes from the enterprise’s cloud data center. Here, data networking or storage networking approaches are utilized to link the cloud app to the enterprise-based data supporting bandwidth, latency, and protocol – whether block-oriented, network-attached database server or simply a content-addressed.
- On-demand Data Placement: Employing cloud data centers on a ‘global network’s backbone’ will boost efficiency and latency. However, if input/output strength and/or network latency are too large for remote access at the initialization of the cloudburst, any requisite data that is not already in the cloud must be placed there. Also, any adjustments need to be merged at the end of the cloudburst in the enterprise store.
- Pre-positioned Data Placement: It can be a powerful approach from a performance perspective by pre-position the cloud data to enable application/server cloud bursting. Though this entails additional costs as a complete secondary storage environment – it is essential to deploy a metro or wide-area network.
Hybrid Clouds – Play Safe
Experts suggest cloud bursting for high performance and non-critical applications that operated non-sensitive information. A software application can be installed locally and then deployed into the cloud server to meet peak demands. However, these application can also be migrated to the public cloud server by releasing up the local resources for applications that are essential for business.
For applications that do not rely on a complex application delivery system or integration with other applications and components, cloud bursting works best.
It’s no secret that enterprises are going all gooey-eyed over hybrid cloud management. But the IT directors of these enterprises need to tread paths carefully. Hybrid cloud solutions might top their wish list. But a haphazard approach can land them in a soup. The best thing to do is to step back, evaluate, and then proceed.
Being in the IT industry for over a decade – Radixweb understands the nitty-gritty of cloud computing, hybrid app development, and how to develop hybrid cloud solutions that help businesses to stay ahead of the competition.
