Building a hybrid cloud isn’t a single project. Before you can integrate your private cloud with a public cloud, you have to have a private cloud. Since most companies don’t have an existing private cloud, getting to hybrid cloud requires three major steps: first, deciding what will be on the private cloud and what will be in the public cloud; next, building the private cloud; and finally, integrating the private cloud with public cloud services.
Step 1: Plan Your Hybrid Cloud
Making the decisions about where you’ll place workloads in the hybrid cloud requires understanding both where you are now and the future state you’ll need to support in the cloud. This requires understanding your business environment and whether operations and business procedures are stable or likely to change due to new technologies.
You need to evaluate both data and workloads and consider security and anticipated volumes to decide where they should reside. Other factors to take into consideration are the required performance and business-criticality of the application. Don’t forget to include development and test instances in your analysis.
Step 2: Implement Your Private Cloud
Having a private cloud requires more than simply using virtualization. Private clouds require scalability and self-service functionality, which can be challenging to implement. Some of this can be addressed through automation and scripting of provisioning; utilizing hyperconverged infrastructure, which is designed to easily expand capacity, also provides support for private clouds. Because of these changes in technology and procedures, you may need to adopt different monitoring and management tools and reorganize your data center support teams to effectively support your cloud.
Step 3: Integrate With the Public Cloud
Once you’ve got your private cloud working smoothly, you can begin to integrate it with the public cloud to create your hybrid. Before doing anything else, take a step back to check whether changes that occurred while you were building your private cloud—technology, business, regulatory—mean you need to revise your public/private cloud deployment strategy.
There’s a lot of additional infrastructure work needed before you can migrate applications, including integrating directory servers and identity management. If public cloud applications or services need to access data from your private cloud, you’ll need to resolve the data movement and security issues. If you plan to use cloud bursting, with the public cloud providing capacity when demand peaks, you need to establish thresholds and automate the process to provision and use cloud capacity. You’ll want to make sure you have appropriate server management and monitoring tools in place before cutting over any critical applications.
Hybrid Cloud Options
The most important step in building a hybrid cloud is understanding your reasons for wanting to use a hybrid cloud and then creating an effective plan. dcVAST provides professional services that can help you assess your cloud needs. We also provide Infrastructure as a Service, managed Nutanix services, and managed Amazon Web Services that deliver robust, supported public and private clouds. Contact us to learn more about building a private or hybrid cloud.
