- Hybrid clouds combine the security of private clouds with the scalability and efficiency of public clouds, offering a more holistic approach to managing computing resources and critical data.
- By leveraging the “pay-as-you-go” model of public clouds and the secure storage of private clouds, hybrid clouds help businesses reduce infrastructure costs and expand storage capacity without upfront investments.
- Hybrid clouds enable seamless migration of resources between on-premises and cloud environments, improve high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, and support agile development and testing processes.
Hybrid cloud, which combines public and private clouds, has been the main model and development direction of cloud computing in recent years. We already know that the private cloud is mainly for enterprise users, for security reasons, enterprises are more willing to store data in the private cloud, but at the same time want to have access to the computing resources of the public cloud, in this case the hybrid cloud is more and more adopted, which will be the mix and match of the public cloud and private cloud, in order to get the best results, this personalised solution, to achieve the purpose of both saving money and security. This blog provides a comprehensive introduction to the characteristics, advantages and application scenarios of hybrid cloud.
Characteristics of hybrid cloud
More comprehensive
The security of private clouds surpasses that of public clouds, while the computing resources of public clouds are beyond the reach of private clouds. In this dilemma, hybrid clouds solve the problem by leveraging the security of private clouds to store critical internal data in local data centres, while also using the computing resources of public clouds to complete tasks more efficiently and quickly. Compared to private or public clouds alone, hybrid clouds are more comprehensive.
Scalable
Hybrid clouds break through the hardware limitations of private clouds by utilising the scalability of public clouds, allowing for the acquisition of higher computing power at any time. By moving non-confidential functions to the public cloud area, enterprises can reduce the pressure and demand on their internal private clouds.
More cost-effective
Hybrid clouds can effectively reduce costs. By using both public and private clouds, enterprises can place applications and data on the most suitable platform to achieve the best benefit combination.
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Advantages of hybrid cloud
1. Cost reduction
Cost reduction is one of the most attractive advantages of cloud computing and a major factor driving corporate management to consider cloud services. The incremental costs of upgrading on-premises infrastructure are high; adding on-premises computing resources requires the purchase of additional servers, storage, power, and, in some extreme cases, the construction of new data centres. Hybrid clouds can help businesses reduce costs by utilising “pay-as-you-go” cloud computing resources, eliminating the need to purchase local resources.
2. Increased storage and scalability
Hybrid clouds provide a cost-effective way for businesses to expand their storage. Cloud storage costs are much lower than equivalent local storage, making it a great option for backup, VM replication, and data archiving. Additionally, adding cloud storage incurs no upfront costs or local resource requirements.
3. Improved availability and access
Although cloud computing cannot guarantee perpetual service uptime, public clouds typically offer higher availability than most local infrastructures. Clouds have built-in redundancy and provide geo-replication for critical data. Technologies like Hyper-V Replica and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups allow us to improve high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) using cloud computing. The cloud also offers nearly ubiquitous connectivity, enabling global organisations to access cloud services from almost any location.
4. Increased agility and flexibility
One of the biggest benefits of hybrid clouds is flexibility. Hybrid clouds allow you to migrate resources and workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa. For development and testing, hybrid clouds enable developers to easily set up new virtual machines and applications without the assistance of IT operations staff. You can also use the elasticity of hybrid clouds to scale certain applications into the cloud to handle peak processing demands. The cloud provides a variety of services, such as business intelligence (BI), analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which you can use on demand rather than building them yourself.
5. Application integration advantages
Many applications offer built-in hybrid cloud integration features. For example, Hyper-V Replica and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups have built-in cloud integration. New technologies like SQL Server’s Stretch Databases also enable you to extend databases from on-premises to the cloud.
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Application scenarios of hybrid cloud
Application load expansion
When businesses deploy applications within a private cloud, they can temporarily rent resources from the public cloud to quickly enhance their response capabilities to seasonal or sudden business peak demands.
Disaster recovery
Hybrid cloud disaster recovery typically adopts a master-slave architecture. In this architecture, users can store backup business data on the public cloud and leverage the public cloud provider’s technical advantages, disaster recovery experience, and operation and maintenance resources to quickly achieve data disaster recovery and ensure service continuity. Compared to using a private cloud alone, hybrid cloud disaster recovery can reduce operation and maintenance workload and save on disaster recovery system costs. In the event of a major disaster in the private cloud data centre, users can quickly switch to the public cloud using cloud hosts to restore backup data, significantly reducing the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and achieving high business availability.
Data backup
The purpose of data backup is to store data or applications at a certain point in time in a safe and reliable location. The typical scenario involves running application loads on either a public or private cloud, while the data backup is stored in a private or public cloud to ensure data security.
Integration of front-end and back-end services
For companies with multiple branches, especially multinational enterprises, if all business is processed centrally at the headquarters data centre, the processing capacity and access bandwidth at the headquarters will become a bottleneck as the business volume increases. By using a hybrid cloud solution, front-end services can be deployed on the public cloud, leveraging the advantages of the public cloud’s multiple regions and CDNs to bring services closer to end users, while the back-end remains deployed in the headquarters’ private cloud. Once front-end processing is completed, minimal front-end and back-end interaction is required to complete the entire business process.
Development and testing environment deployment
For an application, the development and testing process generally requires a flexible and quick environment setup, and frequent restructuring during this period makes the public cloud a good choice. Once the application goes live, it is preferable to run it in a secure and stable environment, which is where the private cloud is considered. In this case, different stages of the same application are independent of each other. By building a hybrid cloud and using DevOps processes and tools, the benefits of the public cloud’s flexibility and the private cloud’s security and stability can be obtained simultaneously.
