As cloud computing has become an increasingly important part of the technology landscape, many businesses and organizations have embraced it as a critical aspect of their technology strategy. To increase their workloads’ performance, availability, and resilience, they are shifting them to the AWS Hybrid Cloud. However, some programs must be re-architected or updated before they can be transferred to the cloud, even though you can readily migrate most apps. In addition, a certain proportion of applications must stay on-premises because of low latency, local data processing, expensive data transfers, or constraints for data residency.
Due to this, many businesses are looking for hybrid cloud architectures to combine their on-premises and cloud operations and accommodate a variety of use cases. As a result, hybrid cloud strategies have become the norm in the IT world. Many of the largest IT companies are building hybrid clouds with AWS. And this is projected to continue as enterprises adopt more cloud-first strategies. To benefit from the scalability, agility, innovation, and global presence that AWS offers, Dropbox has established a hybrid cloud with AWS.
Similar to this, a sizable insurance firm with headquarters in the US has found that adopting a cloud-first strategy has increased business agility. After consuming Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, they leverage AWS Managed Services and infrastructure to provide cloud-native solutions. However, they only take the necessary action alternatives once they have hybrid cloud deploy cases, such as low-latency data processing. Consider tradeoffs like increased operational costs or decreased agility with on-premises equipment when developing a hybrid cloud approach that best suits your business needs.
Building a Hybrid Cloud with Amazon Web Services
If you’re considering building a hybrid cloud and are unsure of your business objectives, these use cases will help you identify and define your objectives. Hybrid clouds are built to facilitate continuing cloud migration, provide business continuity during disasters, extending cloud infrastructure on-premises to serve low-latency apps, or increase your AWS Hybrid Cloud global footprint.
Migrated your Applications to AWS
You may know that significant migrations from on-premises data centers to AWS can take years and involve hundreds of apps. Customers need a consistent operating environment to maintain business continuity during application migration to a hybrid cloud.
You might wish to use the agility and scalability the AWS Cloud provides in conjunction with your on-premises VMware investments. Through the VMware Cloud on AWS service, AWS and VMware have teamed up to make it possible for you to move your VMware vSphere workloads to AWS, operate them there, and use native AWS services in your on-premises settings. To hasten its move to AWS, Stagecoach Group has embraced VMware Cloud on AWS.
AWS Outposts Delivers The Power Of AWS In Your Data Center
AWS Hybrid Cloud Outposts has been designed to meet customers who want to deploy applications on-premises for local data processing or low-latency requirements but still leverage their existing cloud skill sets and tools. For example, some applications require low latency, local data processing, high data transport costs, and data residency. These programs must be set up in-house or near the end users’ systems.
To guarantee operational consistency, customers seek to effortlessly connect these apps with their cloud installations in a hybrid cloud environment. Clients using AWS may need to deploy apps on-premises for local data processing or low-latency requirements. These clients want to keep using the cloud skill sets and resources they have already purchased for these on-premises implementations.
Hybrid Cloud Architecture Tenets
Enterprises must follow specific guidelines to properly establish a hybrid cloud infrastructure and identify one or more tenets for their hybrid cloud implementation. The following are some common tenets of hybrid cloud architecture:
- Hybrid cloud consumers require operational consistency throughout the hybrid cloud in the form of a uniform set of interfaces and APIs for resource provisioning, monitoring, and controlling hybrid cloud resources.
- Straightforward to control, manage, and secure: Hybrid cloud clients want to handle hybrid cloud resources in a way that is simple, consistent, and safe, similar to how AWS Hybrid Cloud APIs work today.
- Build once, deploy anywhere: Hybrid cloud customers want to develop once and deploy workloads to cloud, on-premises, and edge environments in an agile and consistent fashion using standard development and management APIs while getting consistent performance across the environment.
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for enterprise-class applications: Customers that use hybrid clouds want very dependable and available infrastructure comparable to what they receive from AWS today.
- Existing skill sets and tools: While deploying a hybrid cloud, customers often want to leverage already invested organizational skill sets and tools.
Hybrid Networking For A Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud can be implemented using physical infrastructure deployed on-premises and in AWS Regions. The hybrid environment enables traffic exchange through the network that connects various infrastructures.
The AWS Cloud & On-Premises Infrastructure
AWS Hybrid Cloud provides a global edge network (currently 216 points of presence) to AWS customers for accelerating content delivery, domain name services, global load balancing, and security. Additionally, AWS Outposts may be used to install AWS hardware for on-premises infrastructure. AWS also provides edge computing infrastructure with AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength, AWS Snowball Edge, and AWS IoT Greengrass.
The customer infrastructure includes servers, storage nodes, networking devices, and edge computing devices. This infrastructure is hosted in customer-owned or leased facilities, manufacturing/ retail facilities, or spaces near end-users.
Various AWS Direct Connect Options
AWS Direct Connect is a network interconnect option that allows you to establish a private virtual interface from your on-premises network directly to your Amazon VPC. This network provides an elastic, simple, consistent experience that can increase bandwidth throughput.
With AWS Hybrid Cloud site-to-site virtual private network (VPN), you can create an IPsec VPN connection between your Amazon VPC and your on-premises network over the internet. Furthermore, certain apps, particularly those that leverage IoT technologies, exchange traffic with AWS resources such as AWS service endpoints and public EC2 instances via the public internet.
Designing a Hybrid Cloud Management Layer for AWS Outposts
The hybrid cloud management layer provides a uniform set of interfaces for consuming cloud services, including computing, storage, networking, databases, analytics, and others. These APIs offer the ability to manage resources and services on the hybrid cloud, including provisioning, editing, deletion, and monitoring.
This section describes the design practice components of AWS Services that address the needs of building a unified hybrid cloud management layer in support of hybrid cloud services.
Using the same APIs and administration tools for on-premises and AWS infrastructure, AWS Outposts natively offers unified hybrid cloud management. In addition, AWS Hybrid Cloud Outposts also support several AWS Services, such as computation, storage, and networking higher-level services that enable consistent operations throughout the hybrid cloud and do away with creating and maintaining specialized software.
Hybrid Cloud User Authentication & Authorization Works
User authentication and authorization in hybrid cloud environments is a complex problem. You must authenticate the user to the hybrid cloud’s Identity, security, and access management service to gain authorization to the computer service’s management interfaces.
The compute service provides unified user provisioning, monitoring, and operating interface. In addition, the compute service connects with both the essential portfolio or data management level for managing on-premises equipment, the AWS EC2 APIs for controlling EC2, and core metrics and logging, and also the core metrics for logging services for managing metrics and logging requirements, and Identity, security, and access management for obtaining access authorization to on-premises and AWS resources through their respective APIs.
Move Data Between On-Premises And Cloud
Moving data between on-premises and cloud storage is an everyday use case for hybrid cloud. Outside of providing core storage services for blocks, files, and objects, hybrid cloud use cases often require moving data between on-premises data centers and AWS Hybrid Cloud. These use cases are cloud bursting for storage, disaster recovery (data replication and backups), distributed data processing (for analytics processing on AWS), or geographic expansion (moving data closer to customers). In addition, data movement is required for files, block storage, transactional data in databases, and streaming data.
Conclusion
Automation is essential for building and managing hybrid clouds with AWS. It is important to recognize the need for automation from the beginning of the hybrid cloud journey so that businesses and organizations can derive the full benefits of AWS solutions. Using AWS can save your enterprise money and time, but it requires a lot of planning and expertise. And this is where an experienced company like EPC Group can help. We have extensive experience working with AWS and know how to make the most of this solution to benefit your business.
