What Is a Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud integrates private and public cloud services to allow data and applications to be shared between them. This setup gives businesses more flexibility in data deployment and scalability while still having control over sensitive data. The hybrid approach is useful in environments that require regulatory compliance or where low-latency is needed, as it can deploy applications locally while leveraging public cloud resources for other operations.
Companies utilize hybrid cloud to maintain on-premises infrastructure for sensitive workloads while using the scalability of the public cloud. This model is a cost-effective strategy that ensures organizations remain agile in addressing varying workload needs. It supports tackling seasonal business changes without committing to new hardware investments.
Benefits of Building a Hybrid Cloud with AWS
Accelerate Digital Transformation
Hybrid cloud solutions on AWS allow organizations to take advantage of the AWS platform while retaining control of critical systems internally. By embracing hybrid cloud, businesses can adopt emerging technologies and integrate them with legacy systems more easily.
Hybrid cloud also facilitates rapid application development and deployment. It enables DevOps practices through automation tools that function across on-premises and cloud infrastructures. AWS services integrate with existing systems, allowing teams to work more efficiently without disruptive overhauls.
Improve IT and Developer Productivity
AWS hybrid cloud solutions streamline IT operations by reducing the complexity inherent in managing disparate environments. Integrating tools for monitoring, management, and automation provides unified control over resources, thus minimizing administrative overhead. With consistent tools across hybrid environments, teams can focus more on app development rather than infrastructure maintenance.
For developers, hybrid cloud on AWS offers a platform to build, deploy, and iterate applications rapidly. AWS provides services and APIs that work across environments, offering a consistent development experience.
Learn more in our detailed guide to IT mapping
Deliver Differentiated Services and Experiences
Hybrid cloud enhances the delivery of differentiated services by enabling a versatile IT infrastructure capable of supporting innovative solutions. AWS facilitates the creation of tailored customer experiences through analytics services that provide insights from both cloud and on-premises data. This ecosystem supports personalized services, aligning business offerings with market demands.
Incorporating hybrid cloud allows businesses to quickly adapt to customer feedback, refine offerings, and address specific market needs. The agility of AWS hybrid solutions helps in launching new products and enhancing the reliability and performance of existing services.
AWS Hybrid Cloud Solutions and Tools
1. AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts extends AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises facility, enabling a consistent hybrid application development environment.
This service brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to on-premise data centers, via AWS-designed hardware, allowing organizations to operate seamlessly between cloud and local environments. Outposts support various workloads, from low-latency applications to those requiring data processing in local environments.
Source: Amazon
2. AWS Local Zones
AWS Local Zones extend AWS services closer to large population centers, enabling low-latency and proximity-sensitive workloads. These zones provide access to AWS services with minimal latency, ideal for applications like gaming, media rendering, and real-time analytics. Their implementation ensures that critical applications run smoothly by reducing distance-related data transfer lag.
By utilizing Local Zones, businesses can optimize the performance of latency-intolerant applications, providing end-users with superior experiences. The close location of computational resources ensures efficiency in processing workloads demanding immediate response times.
Source: Amazon
3. AWS Snow
AWS Snow provides data transport and edge computing solutions enabling organizations to overcome data transfer challenges from remote sites to AWS. Snow devices are for environments with limited or unreliable connectivity, where traditional cloud uploads are impractical. They ensure secure data transfer by physically delivering storage devices, maintaining integrity, and reliability in data movement.
These solutions are useful for industries like transportation or oil and gas, where remote sites often encounter connectivity hurdles. AWS Snow’s rugged design and embedded compute capabilities facilitate on-site data pre-processing, ensuring data is usable from the moment it arrives in the cloud.
Source: Amazon
4. Amazon ECS/EKS Anywhere
Amazon ECS/EKS Anywhere extends AWS container orchestration capabilities for running Kubernetes or ECS clusters across on-premises and edge environments. These services provide a consistent, cloud-like experience in managing container workloads, whether on AWS or on local infrastructure.
The consistency ECS/EKS Anywhere provides simplifies managing, monitoring, and automating containerized applications across environments. It ensures developers have the tools they are familiar with, minimizing learning curves and speeding up deployment cycles.
Source: Amazon
5. AWS Wavelength
AWS Wavelength integrates AWS compute and storage services within telecommunications providers’ 5G networks, offering ultra-low latency applications. This solution is for developers creating applications demanding single-digit millisecond latencies, such as real-time analytics, machine learning inference, or IoT applications. By reducing the delay data travels from devices to services, it enables emerging applications to provide unrivaled user experiences.
The deployment of Wavelength at the edge of telecom 5G networks offers an enhanced mobile user experience by ensuring applications can access resources swiftly. It provides an environment suitable for new industries emerging from IoT innovations, including autonomous vehicles and augmented reality solutions.
Source: Amazon
Lanir specializes in founding new tech companies for Enterprise Software: Assemble and nurture a great team, Early stage funding to growth late stage, One design partner to hundreds of enterprise customers, MVP to Enterprise grade product, Low level kernel engineering to AI/ML and BigData, One advisory board to a long list of shareholders and board members of the worlds largest VCs
Tips from the Expert
In my experience, here are tips that can help you better leverage AWS hybrid cloud solutions:
- Optimize your Direct Connect setup with redundancy: Use multiple Direct Connect links across diverse locations to increase fault tolerance and minimize latency. This avoids single points of failure between your on-premises infrastructure and AWS.
- Leverage AWS Lambda for hybrid automation: Use AWS Lambda to automate repetitive tasks across both on-premises and cloud environments. Lambda functions can be triggered by on-premises systems using API Gateway and SNS, reducing manual workloads.
- Utilize caching strategies for critical workloads: For latency-sensitive applications, deploy services like Amazon ElastiCache closer to end users using AWS Local Zones. This hybrid caching strategy improves performance while reducing the load on on-premises systems.
- Plan for data residency and sovereignty early: Use AWS Outposts or Local Zones to meet data residency requirements, especially for regions with strict data sovereignty laws. Ensuring that sensitive data stays within your local jurisdiction can save compliance headaches later.
- Use Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics for hybrid visibility: Extend Amazon CloudWatch to monitor on-premises workloads by integrating with Prometheus or other third-party monitoring tools. This gives a unified view of performance and alerts across your hybrid infrastructure.
Example: Hybrid Cloud Architecture on AWS
The diagram below provides a reference architecture for a hybrid cloud environment that extends an on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud.
Source: AWS
In this setup, Amazon EC2 instances run the primary applications and repositories in multiple AWS Regions, while a portion of the infrastructure, such as the SOS Cache server, remains in the on-premises data centers. The distributed architecture of AWS allows organizations to replicate their environment across regions like Oregon, Virginia, Ireland, and Singapore, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and resilience against regional outages.
The hybrid model also incorporates AWS Direct Connect or VPN connections for reliable and high-performance network integration between the cloud and on-premises environments. This ensures fast, secure access to cloud resources for large-scale projects, allowing businesses to scale seamlessly during peak usage by provisioning additional EC2 instances based on demand.
Key components like Amazon CloudWatch are integrated to provide detailed monitoring, enabling businesses to track performance, resource utilization, and overall operational health across both environments. This setup allows teams to manage workflows efficiently, scaling compute resources in the cloud when needed, while maintaining critical data and low-latency operations locally.
This type of architecture is suitable for medium to large enterprises seeking to leverage cloud scalability without sacrificing control over critical systems.
Mastering Hybrid Cloud Management with Faddom
Managing a hybrid cloud environment can be complex, but Faddom simplifies it with clear, real-time visibility across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Our agentless solution maps all servers and applications in under 60 minutes, with continuous, automatic updates.
By visualizing dependencies, Faddom ensures optimal performance and security, giving you confidence in managing your hybrid cloud effectively. Whether scaling up for demand or securing critical workloads, Faddom provides the insights needed to stay in control.
Learn more about Faddom or start a free trial today.
