The future of computing and the open hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that combines on-premises, cloud platform, and third-party, public cloud services, with orchestration between these platforms. This usually includes connecting an on-premises data centre to a public cloud.

Although cloud services can cost savings, their primary value is facilitating a rapid digital business transformation. Every organisation in charge of technology has two agendas: the IT and business transformation agendas. Traditionally, the IT plan has been centred on cost-cutting measures. However, digital business transformation agendas are centred on making money through investments.

The main advantage of a hybrid cloud is agility. A core principle of a digital business is the need to adapt and change direction quickly. To gain the skill required for a competitive advantage, enterprises may want to combine public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises resources.

'Red Hat partners such as Arm, Nvidia, Intel, and others are developing technologies beyond smart servers at the edge. With the right strategy and software, these solutions can function as clouds that extend far beyond the confines of the traditional data centre,' says Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier in his keynote address at the Red Hat Summit 2022.

At this year's Red Hat Summit event, red Hat CEO Paul Cormier told the audience that open-source technologies like Linux and Kubernetes are the backbone of technology innovation and will continue to stay in a small working world—take Disney Animation, for example.

Paul outlined several current roles, including the company's next plan to develop open hybrid cloud technology further.

Raleigh, a North Carolina-based company, held its Red Hat Summit in the same city as parent company IBM's annual Think conference. The two events were held in separate locations, reflecting IBM's decision to keep Red Hat neutral in the market.

Red Hat used its event to whet developers' appetites for the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 operating system, providing more information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9's new capabilities in edge computing, security, and automation.

According to 451 research's 2017 Voice of the Enterprise report, companies generally follow the rule of thirds in their cloud transformation. A third has committed to a single public cloud provider. While this may be efficient on a small scale, businesses risk becoming locked in. Another third employ multi-cloud strategies, but there is no formal integration or orchestration of workloads. They effectively hedge their bets across multiple public and private cloud providers, but they trade the risk of lock-in for added complexity instead.

Red Hat's approach to enabling customers to migrate to a hybrid cloud is based on three pillars. Begin with a hybrid cloud infrastructure designed from the ground up to provide flexibility and choice. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, OpenStack Platform, and Red Hat Storage are built on a hybrid cloud foundation.

Second, make a development platform available for creating and deploying cloud-native apps. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the enterprise's open operating system, the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the platform that connects traditional and modern applications across the hybrid cloud.

OpenShift supports a variety of best-of-breed middleware solutions. Furthermore, infrastructure elements such as storage are integrated into OpenShift, allowing application portability without time-consuming and costly application rewrites or downtime. Management tools for orchestrating workloads and automation tools for simplifying day-to-day operations are critical for realising the total value of a hybrid cloud.

Centralise control of on-premises and cloud-based resources with a hybrid cloud management toolset that includes cost and performance monitoring, security, reporting, and analytics capabilities. There are numerous third-party hybrid cloud management tools, including CloudBolt, Scalr, Nutanix Beam, and Embotics. Explore and test different features within the environment to find the hybrid cloud management tool that best fits that organisation's hybrid architecture.

Infrastructure-as-code tools can also aid in the management of hybrid deployments. For example, Ansible and HashiCorp's Terraform provide hybrid cloud management capabilities. Adopting containers and Kubernetes orchestration is another method for unifying resources in a hybrid architecture.

What is the basis of a hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that combines on-premises, cloud platforms, and third-party public cloud services. To gain the agility required for a competitive advantage, enterprises may want to incorporate public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises resources.