Public cloud relies on large-scale, flexible infrastructure supported by a vendor. It’s difficult for businesses to achieve the benefits of hybrid and private cloud use cases due to the difficulty of implementing cloud in the data center. Now that all three major cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure—offer tools to make hybrid cloud simpler, businesses that see a need for cloud in their data center may want to take another look.
Support for Hybrid Cloud on Amazon Web Services
AWS provides two options for sharing cloud services between Amazon’s data centers and corporate data centers.
Businesses that are virtualized using VMware can use VMware Cloud on AWS. This option makes it easy to extend vSphere environments to AWS.
A broader option for hybrid cloud in AWS is the AWS Outposts solution. Outposts allows any data center to use AWS infrastructure and services including compute, storage, containers, databases, and analytics. Services update automatically when Amazon releases new version. Support and management uses the same tools and processes as managing AWS resources within the AWS cloud environment. Outposts requires companies to obtain hardware from Amazon.
Support for Hybrid Cloud on Microsoft Azure
Like Amazon, Microsoft offers several options for bringing Azure services to the data center.
Azure Stack allows businesses to access Azure services on premises in a variety of scenarios. Azure Stack Edge brings the cloud to IoT and other devices at edge locations. Azure Stack HCI combines the flexibility of hyperconverged infrastructure with the flexibility of the cloud. Azure Stack Hub empowers internal, private clouds with the features and capabilities of Azure. Azure Stack options require pre-certified configurations available from multiple leading hardware vendors.
In addition to Azure Stack, Azure Arc extends the Azure control plane to bring Azure cloud management features to resources wherever they reside. One key benefit is making security consistent across all infrastructure locations. Azure Arc does not require specific hardware.
Support for Hybrid Cloud on Google Cloud Platform
For GCP users, the hybrid cloud solution is Anthos. Anthos doesn’t require specific servers and provides the ability to use the Google Kubernetes Engine in the data center. In addition to bringing cloud to the data center, Anthos allows users to manage their clouds from the data center. The cloud management capability isn’t limited to GCP; Anthos allows users to manage AWS and Azure workloads as well. This makes Anthos a solution for multicloud as well as hybrid cloud architectures.
Hybrid clouds are a good choice for several use cases, but without good tools it’s been difficult to implement them and gain the benefits. Contact VAST IT Services to learn more about how you can use these vendor-provided tools to build and manage your hybrid cloud.
