Enterprises of all sizes are adopting hybrid cloud environments at ever-increasing rates. According to RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 58% of enterprises utilize a hybrid cloud environment, up from 51% in 2018. This type of cloud environment allows enterprises to leverage the cloud without moving all of their applications from a legacy, on-premises infrastructure to the cloud overnight.
A hybrid cloud is a combination of your on-premises infrastructure (or private cloud) and public cloud services from third-party providers. It allows you to continue using your on-premises data center and connects your disparate IT environments, which in turn gives your IT team the resources it needs to quickly spin up resources.
Over the years, hybrid cloud has evolved and is now offering necessary solutions in an increasingly complex and challenging IT landscape. If you appropriately plan for a hybrid cloud solution, it can provide you with on-demand flexibility, empower your legacy systems and applications, and become a true catalyst for your enterprise’s digital transformation. The result is an ever-changing but responsive infrastructure that can quickly adapt to your business needs.
By allowing workloads to transition between your private and public clouds, a hybrid solution provides more flexibility and additional options for data deployment. A hybrid cloud gives you the ability to scale your private cloud (on-premises) up to the public cloud to handle high-demand efficiency without providing access to your entire data center. This way, you can leverage the computing power of the public cloud and keep business-critical data on-premises.
Containers and their role in a hybrid cloud environment
Containers have become crucial to hybrid cloud because of the flexibility they bring to your applications. As you build out services and data within containers, you can easily move them one by one to the public cloud. They also allow you to maintain similar architecture across your on-premises and cloud applications and customize rollouts to different geographic regions, if needed.
Integrating an open, standard-space container platform like Red Hat OpenShift increases your ability to seamlessly move from one cloud provider to another during future migrations. OpenShift is a complete container platform built on Kubernetes, which is an open-source platform that automates Linux container operations and management so each container has policies telling it how and where to run. You can leverage multiple private and public cloud providers at the same time, seamlessly integrating data and applications across all environments.
Deploying containers in your hybrid cloud environment allows you to leverage the right cloud for the right project. You can seamlessly jump from project to project and environment to environment with a container solution like OpenShift.
A quick guide to a hybrid cloud strategy
Now that you understand containers’ role in a hybrid cloud strategy, what business outcomes can you expect? With containers, you can:
- Drive cost savings. Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy is generally less expensive than investing in additional legacy infrastructure. You can scale up and scale down based on your workload.
- Increase agility. The need to adapt and change direction quickly is at the core of your digital business. Combining public and private clouds with your legacy on-premises resources will help you gain a competitive advantage.
- Leverage existing architecture. A hybrid cloud strategy allows you to combine your on-premises infrastructure with the public cloud – there is no need to “rip and replace” or invest in additional data centers.
- Operate applications and components across boundaries and between clouds and architectures. Introducing containers into your hybrid cloud environment allows you to integrate data and applications between multiple environments.
A hybrid cloud environment, combined with Red Hat OpenShift, allows you to respond to dynamic or frequently changing workloads, separate critical workloads from less-sensitive ones, process big data, and prepare for future needs. Learn more about OpenShift’s capabilities and how you can kickstart your company’s digital transformation.
