Is It Time to Embrace Hybrid Cloud?
The cloud is dramatically reshaping the enterprise IT landscape. After an early rush to the public cloud, the majority of companies are settling on a hybrid cloud strategy that can utilize resources from traditional enterprise IT, private clouds, public cloud providers, and CSPs. Key takeaways:
• A hybrid cloud combining on-premises IT services and cloud-based services can deliver substantial business benefits and give your company a competi‐ tive edge over less nimble rivals.
• Bimodal IT, in which separate infrastructure is used to support traditional enterprise applications versus cloud-native applications, is best avoided.
Understanding the Hybrid Cloud
The hybrid cloud offers many potential benefits, including greater agility, elastic‐ ity, self-service, and cost control. Enterprises now prefer the hybrid cloud for these reasons. Key takeaways:
• Public clouds can create significant challenges for some enterprise workloads in terms of total cost, lack of control, performance, and compliance.
• Distributed and edge environments are growing in importance and aren’t easily incorporated in a public-cloud-only model.
• Consider adopting a single cloud operating system in combination with datacenter modernization and careful selection of public cloud and CSP partners.
Assessing Your Hybrid Cloud Needs
This chapter provides detailed guidelines and suggestions for assessing your cur‐ rent and future needs and explains the benefits of creating a decision matrix to guide the process of siting applications going forward. Key takeaways Your assessment process should enable you to:
• Identify how much on-premises infrastructure you need.
• Determine which datacenters and other facilities are targets for moderniza‐ tion.
• Identify target applications and services for public clouds, CSPs, and SaaS providers
Designing Your Hybrid Cloud: On-Premises and Private Cloud
The two most important decisions you must make as you undertake your hybrid cloud design are:
• Deciding on the cloud management framework—the Cloud OS—you will utilize
• Determining the best approach to modernize your on-premises infrastruc‐ ture Key takeaways
• Choosing the right cloud operating system for your organization provides the glue that allows your hybrid cloud to operate as a single, cohesive unit.
• Your decision must take into account the specific cloud elements you require as determined by your detailed assessment (Chapter 3).
• Most enterprises will be best served by a cloud operating system that sup‐ ports both mode 1 and mode 2 applications.
• A modern datacenter architecture is essential to provide increased agility and flexibility and to reduce technical debt.
Designing Your Hybrid Cloud: Public Clouds, CSPs, and SaaS
This chapter provides specific recommendations for choosing public clouds, CSPs, and SaaS providers. Key takeaways
• Public clouds and CSPs compatible with your chosen cloud operating system are strongly preferred.
• Look for CSPs that can offer a high level of industry-specific knowledge.
• Eliminate SaaS providers that duplicate services but be open to opportunities to outsource specific applications.
• Data protection and compliance remains your team’s responsibility regard‐ less of where your data is.
Getting Serious About DevOps
DevOps is a natural extension of the hybrid cloud environment described in pre‐ vious chapters of this report. The right infrastructure is easier to automate, easier to provision, and easier to maintain, allowing your DevOps team to focus more attention on delivering new applications and services rather than dealing with the idiosyncrasies of complex infrastructure. Key takeaways
• Mature solutions exist for source control, configuration management, con‐ tinuous integration and continuous delivery.
• DevOps automation remains the biggest challenge.
• Look for automation solutions that are model-based to simplify definition of dependencies.
• Workflow-driven orchestration and lifecycle management can help you avoid too great a dependency on brittle and difficult-to-maintain scripts.
Adapting Your Organization to Hybrid Cloud
The transition to a hybrid cloud model will in all likelihood require some signifi‐ cant adjustments to your IT organization. Key takeaways
• Freeing up IT resources due to automation combined with reduced reliance on IT specialists, introduces opportunities to flatten your organizational structure or reorganize around new business priorities.
• The organizational changes to enable successful DevOps may require the formation of cross-functional teams with members from across the com‐ pany.
No comments:
Post a Comment