The Hybrid Cloud and How Amazon EKS Anywhere Addresses Distributed Application
What is the difference between a public, private, and hybrid cloud?
In today’s globally scaling world, cloud computing emerges in three different models: private, public, and hybrid clouds. According to the outputs of our product and the region that it serves, we implement one of these three cloud models.
The AWS Public Cloud
In the cloud ecosystem, Amazon Web Services provides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the public cloud space. Amazon EC2 is hosted in an AWS Region and provides infrastructure and services over the public internet. The customer has limited visibility as to where these services are hosted. However, they can facilitate these services anytime, anywhere they need to. The AWS public cloud offers advantages such as low cost of ownership, automated deployments, scalability, security, recovery, and reliability. The AWS public cloud is suitable for the following: data storage, application hosting, auto-scaling environments for large applications, and latency-intolerant or mission-critical web tiers.
The Private Cloud
The private cloud is exclusive to the organization, and it is managed and operated solely by the organization. This cloud model uses a virtualization layer to provision the infrastructure. This model can be tailored to the organization’s configuration needs to support applications and legacy applications that suffer certain issues in the public cloud.
With these advantages in mind, the private cloud requires more organizational resources to oversee the entire infrastructure. This makes the private cloud notably more expensive than the public cloud. The private cloud is advantageous for organizations that must implement strict security, latency, and data privacy and are large enough to support its costs.
The Hybrid Cloud
Imagine that an organization intends to take advantage of cloud infrastructure for both its efficiency and cost savings but also must implement security, privacy, and control. This is where the hybrid cloud model emerges. The hybrid cloud model consists of at least one private and one public cloud. It may also include multiple private and multiple public clouds, and it may use many active machines — physical or virtualized. The need for these machines to communicate with each other seamlessly brings another challenge to the organization. A hybrid cloud is desirable for large organizations that need the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud along with the security and control of the private cloud.
Why do we need the hybrid cloud?
Many of today’s successful businesses are moving beyond the public cloud and into a new era of hybrid IT infrastructure, a combination of the public cloud and private cloud. Organizations are finding that this new “hybrid cloud strategy” is helping them improve the way they run their business processes.
The hybrid cloud approach is highly customizable and flexible, providing tremendous cost savings related to capital expenses. It can be conceived as a tool to improve compliance, security, accessibility, and affordability. The COVID-19 pandemic of recent years has negatively impacted organizations of all sizes. As organizations migrated from traditional office spaces to work-from-home models, the remote work concept significantly changed the way businesses operate.
Many organizations are now allowing employees to work remotely on a permanent basis. Cloud-based operations allow employees to fulfill necessary job obligations without the need for traditional offices. Adopting strategic cloud-based objectives is a necessary component of improving business operations. Although more and more organizations are moving to the cloud, some companies have pulled back from the cloud due to misunderstanding the capabilities of various cloud environments and misconfigurations.
What is EKS Anywhere, and what are its benefits?
In 2018, AWS took a significant step into the hybrid cloud market. Many organizations leverage AWS’s computing and data storage services. However, those services require AWS hardware. This is not an ideal solution for many organizations trying to leverage public clouds along with their on-premises datacenters. In 2021, AWS announced Elastic Kubernetes Cluster (EKS) Anywhere at its re:Invent conference. AWS EKS Anywhere builds on top of EKS Distro and provides customers the ability to leverage Kubernetes on their on-premises datacenters via VMware’s vSphere.
Amazon EKS Anywhere is helping customers simplify the operational process of on-premises Kubernetes clusters with easy default configurations, while providing tools for automating cluster management. AWS supports all Amazon EKS Anywhere components, including integrated third-party software. This is a critical benefit, as customers today rely heavily on various integrations. EKS Anywhere manages these systems in a way that allows customers to reduce their support costs. This builds a sustainable bridge between cloud infrastructure and customers’ on-premises datacenters. Furthermore, customers can leverage the EKS console to manage all of their Kubernetes clusters (including EKS Anywhere clusters) running anywhere, through the EKS Connector.
Amazon EKS Anywhere is a good decision for moving into the AWS infrastructure. AWS understands the surge in demand for end-to-end hybrid cloud platforms.
Conclusion
The hybrid cloud concept has been the trend in recent years because cloud technologies are becoming more popular due to new managed services and new technologies taking the place of traditional IT methods. The hybrid cloud is fundamentally about running your workloads in the best possible environments; edge computing is about bringing the environment to the workload and its associated data, or as close as possible. As a Cloud Team, we help and support our customers in managing their hybrid clouds with highly skilled engineers. Use of the private and public clouds has met at a common point and created the hybrid cloud concept as a result. For companies struggling to navigate cloud computing and its many services, the hybrid cloud is a suitable solution as they gain knowledge and experience migrating into the cloud ecosystem.
