The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 79

5. Understand the tools
Many charged with hybrid cloud management often focus
too much on the management tools that are available.
These tools cover areas such as API management, resource
management, cloud management platforms, performance
management, DevOps management, security management,
network management, native platform management, etc.
There can be as many as a dozen or so tools that you’ll need
if you’re going to manage a hybrid cloud effectively. Picking
tools is a matter of understanding what we’ve defined
above as the requirements patterns, and then figuring out
the solutions patterns that will match. For instance, if your
requirement is that you encrypt all data at-rest or in-flight,
and you need to manage both the encryption and the per-
formance, then you would look for a tool or tools that pro-
vide both types of solutions.
It’s then a matter of working through the requirements,
defining the common patterns, and then matching up the
tools with the pattern. Sometimes you won’t find all of the
tools that you need for all of the patterns. In those cases, you
may consider custom tools. Or, perhaps a hybrid cloud is not
in the cards after all, if management of those workloads on
those platforms can’t be done using automation through
management tools. In other words, in some cases, it’s OK to
leave a workload off a hybrid cloud if they can’t be managed
properly or at a reasonable cost.
Hybrid Cloud Growth and Adoption
Patterns
The issue with hybrid cloud is that the analysts and tech-
nology providers are tossing many things into that cate-
gory. For our purposes, we can call a “hybrid cloud” any col-
lection of systems where you have at least one private
cloud and one public cloud working together to support
systems for IT.
However, managers also need to understand the emerging
notion of the “pragmatic hybrid cloud.” This is a traditional
set of systems, typically running in a data center, paired
with at least one public cloud. This configuration is growing
in popularity, as many enterprises continue the migration to
cloud, but they do so without leveraging a private cloud.
Instead, they pair their traditional systems with public
cloud-based systems.
The emerging patterns are ones of increasing complexity.
The right way to manage these combinations is not straight-
forward, because management needs to deal with the
increasing complexity as well. This presents a new problem
area, because one of the core management reasons for
hybrid cloud adoption is to hide complexity behind an
abstraction layer. In fact, instead of avoiding the complexi-
ties associated with hybrid cloud, managers need to better
understand the native features and capabilities of the pub-
lic or private clouds that make up the hybrid cloud.
Cloud Management: Still More
Art Than Science
Hybrid cloud management is still more of an art than a sci-
ence, considering that we’ve not been at it for very long.
The complexity will likely increase over time, and that will
mean that our approaches to hybrid cloud management
need to evolve as well.
For now, it’s a good time to understand just what you’re
dealing with in terms of technology. If you’re charged with
management of these platforms, you have your work cut
out.
Written by David Linthicum, former SVP, Cloud Technology
Partners (CTP) and currently Chief Cloud Strategy Officer,
Deloitte
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