Best Practices for the Hybrid Cloud

Transcription

1 Best Practices for the Hybrid Cloud

2 Private clouds have been a popular topic amongst IT managers in the past year, but IT organizations that build private clouds need the peak computing power of a public cloud. In this expert e-guide, brought to you by SearchCloudComputing.com, find out why hybrid clouds are the future of cloud computing. Also, for an enterprise to seriously consider adopting the hybrid cloud model, the implementation must be designed so IT pros manage it with the same veracity as an existing private cloud. In the past year, private clouds have dominated discussion amongst IT managers, mostly due to concerns over the security of public clouds. But public clouds are also very appealing, especially for applications and data where security is not a large risk; they're ideal for bursty applications that need peak computing power and storage for short periods of time. We expect IT organizations that build private clouds will eventually look to extend their cloud model to hybrid clouds, meaning that those building a private cloud consider the extensions needed to expand to a hybrid cloud. These are six considerations to keep in mind when planning for hybrid clouds: 1. Security: Security in a hybrid cloud has to happen at the site where the transfer begins, as you'll need to encrypt data before sending it. The data comes across encrypted and the public cloud service provider would not be able to decrypt it. You'll also need a secure VPN. The public cloud needs to know who is accessing resources, but it does not need to know what is going on inside the application. The question is: How can data be farmed out to public clouds and then brought back in securely so that it is not exposing the private cloud to any kind of public breach? Page 2 of 7

3 2. Hypervisor usage: If the hypervisor(s) used in the private cloud differ from what's being used in the public cloud, then you need efficient conversion package(s) that can be used when data and applications are moved between your private and public clouds. If your private cloud is using KVM or VMware ESX and you want to use Amazon (and the Xen hypervisor), then you'll need conversion software. 3. Developing a hybrid cloud environment is difficult: There are no outof-the-box solutions for a private cloud, and certainly none for a hybrid cloud. If you find a vendor that claims that he can build you a hybrid cloud environment, then you will be locked in to their products for a long time. As of right now, you have to patch together software from a number of vendors to build private and hybrid clouds. 4. Understand your data: The ability to run applications in a private cloud during peak usage hours and then offload to the public cloud during off-peak hours affords enormous flexibility. This provides maximum use and efficiency of both internal and external resources. You need to know which data needs high security, which data must be compliant with regulatory requirements and which data you can safely farm out to public clouds. 5. Communication between private and public clouds: You need a trusted arbitrator between the private cloud and the public cloud that allows you to make decisions on what goes to the public cloud. You'll also need to monitor the public cloud's delivery of resources to make sure that they are sufficient for what you need. You will not generally know whether your applications are running in the data center downstairs or in an Amazon public cloud. The capability to know where your applications and data are physically located is important because you do not want them moving from private to public and back again too frequently. 6. Management: Hybrid clouds require greater levels of automation management to achieve higher degrees of availability, performance, and security. According to Ken Ferderer, CTO at LineSider Technologies, the goal of hybrid clouds is that as you run out of capacity in the private cloud, you can Page 3 of 7

4 quickly reach out to the public cloud to get the resources that you need to operate your business, providing a balance between private and public clouds. During critical times for the use of mission critical applications, you can bring them inside the private cloud. When they do not have as high demand, or they are not in use, you push them out to the public cloud. The idea is to move virtual resources back and forth without impacting things like security and without disrupting service. Hybrid clouds are considered the nirvana of cloud computing. For an enterprise to seriously consider adopting the hybrid cloud model, the implementation must be designed so IT pros manage it with the same veracity as an existing private cloud. Here, we examine ways to manage a hybrid cloud -- assuming that the IT teams will follow the enterprise ITIL best practices. No matter how carefully you have selected a public cloud service and how well it matches your private cloud design, differences will inevitably exist. The greater the differences between the two clouds, the more difficult it will be to manage the two clouds as a single entity. The greatest gains will be achieved in extending, as much as possible, your existing management strategies and best practices to the hybrid cloud. A management strategy for hybrid clouds should cover the following areas: Configuration. IT teams must specify best practices for creating, modifying, patching and implementing a cloud installation. A version-controlled library of development and approved production images can help make configuration more effective and secure. Wherever possible, configurations should be created to run in either the public cloud or private cloud. When this isn't the case, the library system should clearly specify with which cloud the image is associated. Page 4 of 7

5 Change control. Despite being a staple of nearly all enterprise ITIL best practices, change control seems to have been overlooked in many of the public cloud implementations. Many small IT shops look to DevOps as a way to quickly implement changes from development to production. Although the startup Software as a Service (SaaS) shop applauds this nimbleness, enterprises view it is as a dangerous shortcut that could impede adoption of the hybrid model. As enterprises agree to use a hybrid cloud model, they need to bring with them the discipline of change control in which developers submit their changes with rollback plans. Patch management will need to be completed a certain number of days from the issuance of vulnerability alerts. Security. Hybrid cloud security includes data encryption in transit and at rest, access control policies, firewalls and network rule enforcement. The enterprise risk-management department should enforce same or similar policies across the public and private cloud. If possible, extending a method for single sign-on, such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol(LDAP), is preferred. Key encryption that is only known by enterprise IT is mandatory. Fault monitoring. For a time, we heard cloud pundits declaring device fault monitoring was not mandatory in the public cloud. The elastic ability of resource provisioning masked underlying device failures and therefore eased the burden of stringent fault monitoring. But as recent high-profile Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) outages have demonstrated, this is not the case. Fault and performance alerts need to be sent to the centralized manager of managers (MOM) who, in turn, opens help desk tickets. If the public cloud has a customer-facing e-commerce function, then a geographically distributed user-experience performance monitor will be required to ensure uptime. Budgetary control. The elasticity of the cloud can be a double-edged sword regarding budgetary control. An IT pro who has inadvertently left an extralarge instance up and running without realizing it until he sees the monthly IaaS usage bill can understand this. Alerts for unused resources and alerts indicating when an IaaS or Platform as a Service(PaaS) charge Page 5 of 7

6 exceeds a threshold will help you maintain budgetary control over cloud resources. Eventually cloud technology will evolve enough to allow enterprises to simply extend private cloud management systems to effectively control an isolated section of the public cloud as well as the network connection binding the two clouds. Enterprise IT will most likely need to incorporate at least some the public cloud management systems to feed back into the MOM. This can occur when you are using a function such as a content distribution network or big data, which don't reside in your private cloud. Enterprises will need to stitch these new cloud systems together with their existing centralized management system to use a single help desk and realize the total cost of ownership (TCO). IT managers have been combining management systems for years; however, cloud is a disruptive technology that's causing IT to adjust their management systems once again. The emergence of the hybrid cloud adoption signals that cloud technology is maturing enough for enterprise IT shops, allowing them to extend sensitive applications into a multi-tenant public cloud environment. But the days of the "DevOps cloud cowboys" will fade into the sunset as the enterprise IT departments lock down data according to enterprise-grade management best practices. Page 6 of 7

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