The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 77

Hybrid cloud management is more of an
art than a science, and the complexity will
likely increase over time. This means that
our approaches to hybrid cloud
management need to evolve as well.
If you use cloud computing, chances are good that you
leverage some sort of hybrid cloud as part of your environ-
ment. Until recently, this usually meant pairing a private and
public cloud, such as OpenStack and Amazon Web Services.
Today, the term “hybrid” typically means legacy, or tradi-
tional, systems paired with one or more public clouds, a sin-
gle private cloud that interfaces with two or more public
clouds, or any combination thereof.
Things get complex, quickly. As enterprises attempt to fig-
ure out the best approaches to security, governance, and
management, they’re finding that no single approach or
tool can solve all problems. So, if an enterprise IT shop has
a hybrid cloud or, more likely, more than one hybrid cloud,
what should it do about management?
The first step is to understand the essentials. When defin-
ing them, it’s not about just picking the tools and technol-
ogy you’ll use. Most IT operations managers make the mis-
take of focusing on tools that may make hybrid cloud
management easier, rather than understanding their own
requirements, which means they get both the approach and
the tool selection wrong. You need to understand the secu-
rity, data, governance, and end-user dynamics that affect
how you approach hybrid cloud management.
Here are five concepts that you need to understand before
moving to a hybrid cloud management platform.
1. Understand what’s being managed
While this seems like the single most important thing to
know, many of those who define a hybrid cloud manage-
ment strategy fail to understand the profiles of the work-
loads that will run on public and private cloud(s). You need
to understand what the applications do, including how they
interact with the end users, manage data, how they handle
networking, security patterns, performance, etc.
Specific things need to be understood, as follows:
• Who owns the workload within the organization?
Who needs to be contacted when things go south?
• What do the workloads do for the business, per their
criticality to the business? This goes to how many
resources you spend on managing the workloads on
the hybrid cloud, which need to align with the value
they bring to the business.
• When do the workloads run? Some run continuously,
while others may run during the same hour in the
day. Again, this goes to how you approach the man-
agement of workloads within the hybrid cloud.
• Where do the workloads run? On the public cloud,
private cloud, or in both places?
• Why were the decisions made about where to run the
workload? And when may they need to be
re-evaluated?
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