Across the globe, IT departments are under enormous pressure to reduce costs, provide reliable service, and hit targets around consolidation of resources and provision of business-critical services.

Combining these requirements in line with an organisation’s overall need to respond quickly and, at times, with huge capacity, means many are using cloud computing to provide the ability to cope with the sudden demand.

Beyond “burst scaling”, however, hybrid cloud models offer organisations significant advantages over legacy data centre-based solutions. But the feeling among many IT decision-makers is that increasing infrastructure complexity will push the burden of management to the fore of operations for their existing staff and resources, and be a distraction from ongoing business support and enablement.

The hybrid cloud journey

A webinar available here from SUSE shows those same IT decision-makers that progression to a hybrid cloud computing model need not be undertaken as a sudden jump. In fact, a gradual approach is advisable. By letting the business’s cadences and requirements dictate the waypoints, an evolutionary journey to the hybrid cloud (a mixture of multi-cloud, public and private data centres, on-premise and edge) will achieve better outcomes.

Jeff Reser and Ron Nunan of SUSE take the audience through a process that considers what should be at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds: the strategies, considerations and potential missteps that they may face when looking to a hybrid cloud topology.

In general, longer-term adoption and evaluation of hybrid should be combined with skills development for staff and allow the IT function to drive cultural changes across the broader enterprise. It is not, Ron says, a decision and process that is taken by IT alone.

Getting the basics right

Modernising the IT stack in 2021 need not involve adding complexity as new cloud-based systems and processes integrate with existing provisions. With the right method, interoperability can be monitored, security policy maintained, and service level agreements still adhered to. That creates a situation in which services that have transitioned can be gradually brought into production, with constant evaluation and monitoring to ensure availability and compliance.

Ron Nunan (SUSE Public Cloud) outlined some of the applications and services in typical use in the enterprise that might be best suited for initial cloud deployment. Prioritising particular workloads or services for the initial steps into the cloud is one of the easier wins, he said. Scalable, compute-intensive applications are a natural fit, as are any existing containerised applications. Good candidates also include specialist provisions that could not previously scale without significant extra resources.

To ensure interoperability, a Hybrid Cloud Management platform can provide the necessary oversight. Such systems abstract control away from the data layer, and therefore mask the underlying cloud and local infrastructure combinations. HCM solutions rely on shared and consistent APIs between public and private clouds, microservices, more traditional monolithic services, and application instances. APIs are critical, especially so when microservice-based applications move into production. Furthermore, platform- and cloud-agnosticism are reliant on API frameworks, as is scalability. Develop once, deploy everywhere was a recurring theme throughout the 40-minute event.

Two additional elements to a successful cloud journey became apparent: orchestrating and managing cloud-native containerised applications requires a cloud-first application platform such as Cloud Foundry as a management system, ideally running industry gold-standard Kubernetes. Use of K8s maintains interoperability between competing cloud providers, ensuring that cost levels can be minimised continuously by migrating to different clouds when necessary.

A recurring theme was that of the elements of complexity that might be encountered should the organisation not properly consider available partners and platforms. It was suggested that enterprises leverage SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform, which provides cloud solution deployment management and a stress-free platform for container and Kubernetes management.

Outcomes

For IT decision-makers unsure of how to utilise cloud’s advantages without having to retool and reskill, as well as commit significant resources, we recommend this on-demand webinar as a valuable source of insight.

You will learn how to transform your business operations without negative impact during the journey to hybrid cloud and so provide reliability and valuable ability to scale. However, doing so needs an understanding of the trade-offs between the data centre, multi-cloud and edge computing, and which combinations are optimal for best performance.

Converged container and virtual infrastructures have the advantage of being deployable not as and where technology dictates, but instead according to business need. Managing such infrastructures from a single point of control needs the right platforms, and that enterprise-wide change in mindset SUSE’s Ron Nunan stressed.

For decision-makers who know that hybrid computing is the best way to combine the best in local security and management with cloud’s agility and cost-effectiveness, this webinar is an invaluable resource from which to learn.