THE HYBRID CLOUD Private and Public Clouds Better Together Bruno Terkaly Principal Software Engineer Cloud Architect Open Source/Linux Global ISV at Microsoft
A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD A growing trend in the world of cloud computing is the rapid adoption of **hybrid** cloud. It s clear that we don t live in a single cloud world. As cloud adoption continues to increase, it s evident that no single platform can support the wide variety of IT Ops, Development and Business Unit requirements. The need for both private and public cloud resources is clear for a variety of reasons. A hybrid cloud solution combines the flexibility, agility and cost benefits associated with public cloud with the control, security and performance benefits of the private cloud. Indeed, hybrid clouds will continue to represent a dominant cloud usage model for the next several years. A recent survey from RightScale indicates a strong uptick in hybrid cloud adoption, showing increases from 63 percent to 77 percent, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year. These trends are expected to continue and for good reason. More interesting is the fact that consumption of the private cloud is growing faster. The number of enterprises running more than 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) in public cloud increased from 13 percent to 17 percent, while those running more than 1,000 VMs in private cloud grew from 22 percent to 31 percent. Figure 1: The growth of the hybrid cloud THE HYBRID CLOUD // WHITE PAPER 01
HOSTWAY HYBRID CLOUD POWERED BY MICROSOFT AZURE Hostway has been observing the trend toward hybrid computing for some time and has optimized its product line to deliver a best of breed hybrid experience. There are two primary components that define the Hostway Hybrid Cloud offering; first is Hostway s Virtual Private Cloud powered by Windows Azure Pack. The second is Microsoft Azure public cloud, backed with Hostway Managed Support. Taken together, these two components provide a consistent, easily managed hybrid cloud computing solution. CONSISTENCY IS KEY By definition, Hybrid cloud involves the integration of multiple cloud resources into a highly flexible solution. And while the underlying technology powering the solution may be complex, the support and management tools delivered by the cloud provider should be designed to maximize ease of use. In the case of the Hostway Hybrid cloud, the entire solution (public and private environments) is bundled with consistent, proven Hostway managed support. This means that Hostway provides guidance on solution design and configuration, while also delivering day to day operational support allowing IT organizations to focus limited resources on high ROI activity such as application development. From a design perspective, a Hybrid cloud solution has the potential to introduce challenges related to environment consistency where the technologies used to support a private cloud are often very different from the technologies used to support a public cloud. Hostway s Hybrid Cloud addresses these challenges head on by providing users with an Azure-consistent experience across both private and public clouds. This allows IT organizations to train personnel on a single set of tools for managing both cloud environments. THE HYBRID CLOUD // WHITE PAPER 02
Not only is consistency at the management interface level (eg. portal) important, consistency is critical with respect to programmatic interfaces used to automate the management and provisioning of cloud resources. By leveraging Azure Pack (rest-based programmatic interface) for its Private Cloud offering, Hostway opens the door for practically any application or tooling to be able to interact with the API. In addition, the Powershell scripting environment works consistently for both the Private and Public clouds. At the end of the day it s about allowing IT departments to focus on their core competitive advantage, not on mastering a diverse set of cloud automation tooling. This is what is meant by business agility. Figure 3: A consistent hybrid cloud management experience A screen snapshot of the portal experience can be seen at right. The beauty of interface lies in its consistent operation, whether you are managing Hostway Virtual Private Cloud infrastructure or Azure s public cloud infrastructure. The similar look and feel dramatically simplifies the management experience, in addition to lowering costs through less training for IT professionals. Figure 4: A consistent experience for IT professionals, developers, and customers THE HYBRID CLOUD // WHITE PAPER 03
SUPPORTING FLEXIBILITY Within the Hybrid Cloud construct, Public Cloud is all about flexibility. It allows users to only pay for what they use providing an environment that can be rapidly provisioned to support burst traffic, then decommissioned when demand subsides. IT shops often use public cloud to support workloads such as corporate websites and dev & test environments where having the ability to rapidly spin up/down resources is important. PROVIDING CONTROL AND CONFIGURABILITY For workloads with more predictable load and/or those that require specific hardware and software configurations, Private Cloud is often the best solution. Hostway s Virtual Private Cloud offers hardware configurations including the Octo core E5-2667 processor, 64 GB of RAM, and 800 GB of lightning fast SSD storage. By maximizing CPU, memory and storage capacity, applications such as high speed databases are well-suited to a Virtual Private Cloud. And because the compute cluster is dedicated to a single tenant, there are no issues associated with sharing resources across multiple users. PRIVATE CLOUD AND COMPLIANCE An especially interesting Private Cloud use case relates to security and compliance initiatives with organizations often leveraging Private Cloud as part of an effort to meet HIPAA, PCI, and Sarbanes- Oxley requirements. The Hostway Virtual Private Cloud - powered by Azure Pack, helps enable appropriate coordination and compatibility across cloud environments. This is important for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), where businesses must ensure that the data moving between two clouds is protected through appropriate authentication and identity constructs. THE HYBRID CLOUD // WHITE PAPER 04
Other built-in Azure pack features help support compliance initiatives. For example, the ability to define and track performance metrics, standardize network and virtual machine configuration, define a disaster recovery and backup strategy, protect against intrusion detection are built in the Azure pack. In terms of compliance audits, an important area of focus relates to authentication and identity management. The Hostway Virtual Private Cloud provides built-in support for claims-based authentication and federated identity services, which are industry standards related to applications and customer information security. Another important aspect is that identity and authentication needs to work consistently and transparently across both private and public clouds. Many of the audits conducted to ensure compliance take a close look at the directory services, authentication and authorization mechanisms. The reason this is such an important topic is because it extends beyond users simply having access to line of business applications. Authentication plays a critical role when you want to grant access to the management portal for administrators and for users. It also plays a key role with the Service Management REST API. Any compromises to authentication and authorization puts the entire IT infrastructure at risk. Finally, Azure Pack supports claims-based authentication and the ability of an external entity (known as Security Token Service) to create and sign security tokens, specifically SAML 2.0 compliant tokens, which are useful in supporting single sign-on scenarios. This capability allows the user to be authenticated once and to access protected resources in both the private and public cloud without the need to authenticate twice. THE HYBRID CLOUD // WHITE PAPER 05
SUMMARY Growth in hybrid cloud adoption is a direct result of the variability in application design and hosting requirements. Hybrid cloud embraces the notion that there is no such thing as a one size fits all cloud, allowing IT organizations to select the best cloud environment for their unique needs. By combining Azure public cloud with Hostway Virtual Private Cloud, the Hostway Hybrid cloud seeks to maximize flexibility, control and cost-effectiveness in an Azure-consistent solution. Whether running an Ecommerce website, development environment or high IOP database organizations will get the most out of their Hybrid Cloud deployment if they give careful consideration to the requirements of each individual application or workload, then select the best Hybrid cloud resource for the job. THE HYBRID CLOUD // WHITE PAPER 06