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Hybrid Cloud with Azure: 5 Tools and a Reference Architecture

Read Time: 6 minutes

What Is a Hybrid Cloud? 

Hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that combines the benefits of both public and private clouds. It enables businesses to share data and applications between these two environments. This setup allows organizations to maintain control over sensitive data by keeping it on a private cloud while leveraging the scalability and cost-efficiency of public cloud services. Hybrid cloud solutions enable flexibility and optimization of existing infrastructure investments by integrating workloads across multiple environments.

Organizations adopting a hybrid cloud can respond better to dynamic business needs. The flexibility offered by hybrid environments enhances operational efficiency, as businesses are not confined to a single infrastructure. This adaptability also allows for improved disaster recovery and business continuity strategies.

Azure Hybrid Cloud Features and Capabilities 

Azure offers several features to help organizations adopt hybrid cloud strategies and manage workloads across different environments: 

  • Enhanced security: Through tools like Azure Security Center, businesses can monitor and safeguard both cloud and on-premises environments in a unified manner. This holistic security management ensures that all workloads, regardless of their location, are protected against evolving threats.
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity: With solutions like Azure Site Recovery, organizations can replicate and back up data across different environments, ensuring that services remain available even during outages or disasters. This is particularly important for businesses with critical operational demands.
  • IT agility: Azure enables rapid development and deployment of applications. With Azure DevOps and other integrated tools, developers can work in a consistent environment across private and public clouds, leading to improved efficiency and faster time-to-market for new solutions.

Azure Tools and Pricing Options for Hybrid Cloud Management 

1. Azure Arc

Azure Arc extends Azure management to any infrastructure, allowing for a unified control plane. Users can deploy and manage applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, while maintaining centralized governance and compliance. Azure Arc can run Azure data services anywhere ensures that businesses can maintain consistency, regardless of their infrastructure’s location.

This tool also enables the deployment of virtual machines and containers at scale. Developers and IT teams gain the versatility to innovate without the constraint of traditional infrastructure boundaries.

Source: Microsoft

2. Azure Stack

Azure Stack is an extension of Azure services to on-premises environments, providing a consistent hybrid experience. It enables users to deliver Azure services from their local data center, allowing for integration between cloud and on-premises services. Businesses can use Azure Stack to develop and deploy applications with identical tools and resources found in Azure public cloud.

Azure Stack also supports disconnected environments or those with limited connectivity to the cloud. This flexibility is crucial for industries needing local data residency, allowing them to fulfill regulatory and compliance obligations while still benefiting from cloud technologies. Azure Stack is pivotal for a consistent and integrated hybrid strategy.

Source: Microsoft

3. Azure IoT Edge

Azure IoT Edge extends cloud intelligence to IoT devices through edge computing. This service allows real-time processing of data near the source, minimizing latency and bandwidth usage. By deploying AI modules directly onto IoT devices, organizations can enhance performance and efficiency while continuing to benefit from cloud-based management and analytics.

IoT Edge supports offline operations, ensuring devices function optimally even when not consistently connected to the Internet. The capability to process data locally is invaluable for industries like manufacturing and agriculture, where real-time decision-making is crucial. Azure IoT Edge blends the best of both edge and cloud computing.

Source: Microsoft

4. Azure ExpressRoute

Azure ExpressRoute offers a private connection to Microsoft cloud services, enabling a more reliable, faster, and secure data exchange compared to public Internet connections. It is designed for latency-sensitive applications, ensuring stable performance through dedicated bandwidth and lower latency.

With ExpressRoute, organizations benefit from enhanced security and reliability due to its separation from the public internet. This makes it suitable for enterprises with strict compliance needs or sensitive data processing requirements.

Source: Microsoft

5. Azure Hybrid Benefit

Azure Hybrid Benefit helps businesses optimize their IT spending by allowing them to use existing on-premises licenses for Azure services. This cost-savings feature provides significant financial efficiency, enabling organizations to move workloads to Azure without incurring additional licensing expenses.

Moreover, the benefit aids seamless transitions, helping to balance current infrastructure investments with future cloud strategies. By leveraging these existing license investments, minimizing costs and maintaining license compliance.

Source: Microsoft

Lanir Shacham
CEO, Faddom

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 adapt to the hybrid cloud, particularly with Azure:

  1. Leverage tagging for unified resource management: As you integrate on-premises resources with Azure Arc, enforce a consistent tagging strategy across your hybrid environment. This simplifies tracking, cost management, and governance, especially when multiple teams or applications use the same hybrid infrastructure.
  2. Prioritize workload placement based on latency requirements: For performance-sensitive applications, analyze latency between public cloud and on-premises environments. Use Azure Stack for workloads needing low-latency processing while placing less latency-sensitive applications in Azure’s public cloud to optimize both performance and cost.
  3. Integrate security policies early with Azure Policy: Use Azure Policy to define and enforce security, compliance, and operational standards across your entire hybrid environment. Doing this during the design phase avoids costly retrofitting and ensures regulatory compliance from the start.
  4. Utilize containerized applications for portability: When building applications in hybrid environments, prefer containerized architectures using tools like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Arc. This ensures portability across different cloud and on-premises environments, reducing vendor lock-in and simplifying application migration.
  5. Audit hybrid environments with Azure Monitor: Ensure continuous visibility across your hybrid cloud by implementing Azure Monitor to track performance and detect anomalies. Set up proactive alerts for key metrics across both cloud and on-premises environments, avoiding surprises and improving uptime.

Example: Hybrid Management and Deployment for Kubernetes with Azure Arc 

Azure Arc enables organizations to centrally manage and deploy Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments, including on-premises, edge locations, and different cloud platforms. Here is a reference architecture showing how to use Azure Arc to attach and configure Kubernetes clusters outside of Azure while managing them through the same tools used for native Azure resources.

Source: Azure

Once a Kubernetes cluster is connected to Azure Arc, it is assigned an Azure Resource Manager ID and a managed identity, allowing for centralized governance. This integration provides a consistent management experience regardless of where the cluster is hosted, whether in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), on-premises, or a third-party cloud.

Key Azure Arc components for Kubernetes management include Azure Policy and Azure Monitor. With Azure Policy, organizations can enforce compliance and governance policies across hybrid Kubernetes clusters, ensuring that workloads adhere to security and operational standards. Azure Monitor provides visibility into the performance of these clusters by collecting metrics and logs, allowing businesses to monitor containers and nodes in real-time across different environments.

For deployment and application management, Azure Arc supports GitOps. This approach allows teams to define the desired state of their Kubernetes clusters in a source repository like Git, enabling automated, policy-driven deployments at scale. Applications and configurations are continuously deployed to the clusters, ensuring consistency and compliance across all environments.

Related content: Read our guide to hybrid cloud architecture

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.

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