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eBook

The Many Paths to the Hybrid CloudHow enterprises approach the hybrid cloud affects their monitoring requirements

By Lee Atchison

http://www.newrelic.com

https://twitter.com/newrelic

http://blog.newrelic.com


Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Hybrid Cloud 03

Chapter 1: Using Hybrid Clouds to Add Data Center Capacity 05

Chapter 2: Using Hybrid Clouds to Add Cloud-Based Capabilities 07

Chapter 3: Using Hybrid Clouds for App Migration 10

Chapter 4: Monitoring Complex Hybrid Cloud Environments 12




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The Many Paths to the Hybrid Cloud


Introduction: The Hybrid CloudAs enterprises increasingly move to the cloud, many of them are

finding that they’re not yet ready to completely abandon their data

centers and move all of their workloads to the public cloud. Instead,

they’re often taking a hybrid approach, keeping some workloads in

on-premise data centers while leveraging the cloud for other tasks.

But while the term “hybrid cloud” has found its way into common

usage among IT operations folk, not everyone agrees on exactly what

it means. Basically, a hybrid cloud refers to any situation in which you

have applications or their services running in your company’s data

center, and in one or more public clouds, such as AWS, Microsoft

Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

A private cloud, meanwhile, is when your company incorporates cloud-

type architectures and capabilities into your own private data center.

The goal here is to make your data center “look” like a cloud and take

advantage of cloud principles and best practices, but it is reserved for

your company’s own use.

Competing definitionsSome people use the term “hybrid cloud” specifically to refer to

companies that use a public cloud and have implemented a private

cloud in their own data centers.

To me, though, any time you have a data center connected to the

public cloud and applications shared between that data center and a

public cloud, you’ve got a hybrid cloud … no matter how you choose to

manage your private data center.

Given that definition, lots and lots of companies have a hybrid cloud to

one extent or another. There is nothing magical about it.

Basically, the hybrid cloud is a tool for any organization that wants to

take advantage of some of the benefits that the cloud provides without

having to move everything in its application infrastructure over to a

public cloud.

3 Types of hybrid cloudsThe increasing importance of the hybrid cloud may not be news, but

there is more than one way to implement a hybrid cloud. In broad terms,

there are three different approaches to implementing a hybrid cloud:

1. Using the hybrid cloud to add data centers and capacity

2. Using the hybrid cloud to add cloud capabilities

3. Using the hybrid cloud for app migration

It’s important to note that these approaches are not exclusive. Many

companies undertake multiple, simultaneous cloud migrations, each one

using a different approach—or combination of approaches—and affecting

different applications and different business units with particular needs

and goals.

A company typically will have multiple applications, some of them in

the cloud, some of them in traditional data centers, and some of them

various hybrids. This kind of multi-variant hybrid cloud environment

enables the company to handle the needs of all these cases.




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Prioritizing cloud migrationsBut that doesn’t mean they all happen the same way at the same time. Often, companies prioritize moving applications to the cloud based

on the type of the application:

Not surprisingly, that multifaceted combination has important implications for monitoring and managing the performance of all those applications.

We will look at those issues in Chapter 4.

FirstMove experimental or

test/validation environments.Move “internal” applications, including internal tooling and

intranet capabilities.

Move large “web applications” with large web-based customer footprints.

Move large, legacy, business-critical applications. In many

cases, these types of applications may never be moved to the cloud.

Second Third Fourth

MigrationPriorities





CHAPTER 1

Using Hybrid Clouds to Add Data Center Capacity




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Perhaps the most common hybrid cloud use cases comprise companies

that simply want to be able to provision new servers faster than they

can in their own data centers. Their purpose for moving to a hybrid

cloud architecture is not to adopt particular cloud capabilities, but

simply to leverage the cloud as an extension of their own data centers.

This may be to quickly address ongoing growth in production capacity

requirements, since public clouds can often add capacity at a rate

much faster than a traditional data center. Or a company may want

to merely spin up temporary application environments for testing

and debugging applications. Or it may want to create a whole new

data center in the cloud to improve its availability, or to get better

“coverage” in specific regions of the world. Again, public cloud vendors

can often do this much faster and cheaper than a company could

build its own data center.

Compliance is another common driver for hybrid cloud adoption.

Some industries have specific geographic compliance requirements

that specify where data must be stored. Others insist that data be

stored locally or regionally (as is the case with some European Union

compliance regulations), while still others may require data to be

geographically distributed (often, in data centers at least 100 miles

apart) for backup, redundancy, and disaster recovery reasons.

Whatever the reason, the cloud can be a relatively easy, quick, and

affordable way to spin up an entire new data center—or additional

data center capacity—to augment existing data centers.

Monitoring challenges when adding data center capacity in the cloudEvery hybrid cloud use case brings its own monitoring challenges.

When using a cloud provider as an additional data center or for

additional data center capacity, it is important to ensure that your

monitoring tools work consistently across all your infrastructure—

including the portions in your own data centers and in the cloud.

If you have different monitoring tools based on the location of your

application or infrastructure components, you may have a difficult time

diagnosing problems across domains. Additionally, configuring your

tools, setting up alert thresholds and conditions, and similar monitoring

management tasks can be more complicated when you have to use

multiple monitoring tools.

Using Hybrid Clouds to Add Data Center Capacity





Using Hybrid Clouds to Add Cloud-Based Capabilities

CHAPTER 2




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As hybrid clouds become more and more common in enterprise

IT settings, an increasing number of use cases and journeys are

becoming apparent.

In Chapter 1, we looked at how the hybrid cloud can be a faster and

more economical way to add new data center or server capacity—or

even an entire new or better data center. But the ability to provision

computing resources quickly is only one part of the cloud story.

The public cloud also provides unique capabilities that are very

attractive for use in many applications, including applications that

are not naturally cloud-based applications. Taking advantage of

these capabilities in the cloud is typically much easier (or at least

less impossible) than building them yourself, saving significant

development time and cost, which benefits both enterprise dev and

ops teams.

A simple example is Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service, which

provides an inexpensive, efficient, easy-to-use yet secure, resilient,

and massively scalable file-storage mechanism for many applications.

Imagine, for instance, that your company has a video management

app that needs to store large video files and make them accessible to

users around the world. Taking advantage of S3 is a popular way to

deliver that functionality without having to build it and provide the

infrastructure to operate it yourself.

Using Hybrid Clouds to Add Cloud-Based Capabilities




https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

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Coping with huge quantities of dataAnother example is the cloud’s much larger “edge” capability to

provide highly scalable data bandwidth. For instance, some mobile

applications and Internet of Things (IoT) use cases require huge

quantities of data to be imported and stored for later processing.

This may be because customers download lots of data from an

application (such as video streaming), or because an application must

communicate with a large number of agents all over the Internet (such

as with IoT applications). If a company needs a bigger data intake or

data export pipe than its data center can cost-effectively provide, the

public cloud is extremely good at performing this type of “edge” data

intake/export at almost any scale.

Then there’s the need for unique data processing, such as video

processing. If you are adding new capabilities to your applications that

deal with giant data sets, you may be able to find already optimized

solutions available in the cloud. The cloud-based versions can give you

a rapid way to add these capabilities to your application or company,

usually without a massive upfront investment.

The cloud also offers managed capabilities that can help reduce

your operational support burden. Dealing with databases, managing

services, and creating application environments are use cases perfectly

tailored to cloud-based services such as Amazon’s RDS and Elastic

Beanstalk. While useful for production workloads, these technologies

are especially useful for internal-use applications, experimental

applications, or application-testing environments, where the ability to

leverage the cloud to handle much of the operational support burden is

highly valuable.

Finally, the cloud offers a highly scalable ability to handle extremely

large data sets, making it easier to build data warehouses, perform map-

reduce operations, and handle other data analyses useful in providing

business analytics and other high-volume data-processing operations.

Monitoring challenges when adding cloud-based capabilitiesEdge tier data-bandwidth connections and high-volume data-

processing capabilities are likely central to your application, so you

need a monitoring solution that monitors them as easily as it does the

rest of your infrastructure—including the on-premise components.

More generally, if you think about the cloud capabilities that make

moving these components to the cloud useful in the first place, it’s

typically the cloud’s ability to handle large scaling requirements

and/or huge data management. But don’t forget that large scaling

and big data applications also generate huge quantities of analytics

and monitoring data. Your monitoring toolkit must be able to handle

this cloud-scale volume of data, and that typically means a cloud-

based monitoring solution.

Small edge

Big edge




https://aws.amazon.com/rds/

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/


CHAPTER 3

Using Hybrid Clouds for App Migration




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Using Hybrid Clouds for App MigrationFor many companies, the goal isn’t to share their applications across

both their own data center and the public cloud. Rather, they want to

move some of their applications lock, stock, and barrel to the cloud. If

some of the company’s apps live in the cloud while others remain in the

on-premise data center, then intentionally or not, these companies also

have hybrid clouds.

The process of migrating entire apps to the cloud, virtually unchanged,

is sometimes called “Lift and Shift.” In some cases, companies lift and

shift entire applications to the cloud pretty much as they are, while

others may re-architect those applications to make them better cloud

citizens, or to make greater use of cloud features.

App migration is often part of the process of outsourcing as much of a

company’s data center infrastructure as possible. Many of these migrations

are in process at companies of all sizes, and most companies choose to

migrate some applications but not others. Typically, “internal only” apps

are migrated first, while the big, clunky mainframe apps are the last to be

moved—and some of these apps may never make the transition.

In fact, many companies stop their app-migration process after

moving only some of their applications to the cloud, usually for some

business or technical reason. They may decide that the cost/benefit

ratio for moving some applications, such as older or “problematic”

applications, is not worth the effort. This creates an ongoing hybrid

cloud architecture.

Monitoring challenges for “lift and shift”You need a solid monitoring story to understand how your application

works both before and after an app migration. That’s because you need

to compare your application’s performance before the migration and

after the migration. Variations in performance between the two could

indicate a problem, or a need for further tuning and refinement in order

for the application to function successfully in the cloud.

In order to monitor the results before and after migration, you need to

use the same monitoring tools in both environments or the comparison

may not be meaningful. This implies using a monitoring tool that works

in the cloud and on-premise.

Even if you plan on completing the “lift and shift” maneuver and move

100% to the cloud, it is important that your monitoring solution work

with your entire infrastructure, including

both on-premise and cloud infrastructure

components, during the migration itself.

Depending on the size, complexity, and

number of applications in question,

that process could take months or

even years.





CHAPTER 4

Monitoring Complex Hybrid Cloud Environments




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Monitoring Complex Hybrid Cloud EnvironmentsHybrid clouds often involve a wide variety of paths and use cases, even

within single organizations. That means that many companies end up

with surprisingly complex hybrid cloud environments, either during a

transition to the cloud, or on an ongoing basis.

The biggest issue in monitoring complex hybrid cloud environments?

Consistency.

You need a monitoring strategy that works across your entire

organization and handles all of its needs in the same way. This includes

on-premise legacy applications, newly created cloud-only applications,

mobile apps, and naturally hybrid applications. Using a single

monitoring vendor helps you provide a consistent monitoring story

companywide, reducing administrative complexity and the chance that

important data will be lost or underutilized.

One tool to rule them allWhen you have some of your infrastructure in the cloud and some in

your data center, you obviously want your tooling and management

to, as much as possible, work in a consistent way across both

areas. This is why technologies like OpenStack are so popular.

They attempt to make private data centers look as much like

the public cloud as possible.




https://www.openstack.org/

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The same goal applies to your monitoring solution. The worst

scenario is to use one set of monitoring tools in your data center,

and another set of monitoring tools in the cloud. You want one set

to monitor everything.

Diagnosing problems is much harder if you have to keep switching

tools. And even small delays resolving a crisis could cost you money

and customers. In addition, using multiple tools places an additional

cognitive load on your engineering, operations, and support staff. The

more tools they need to use to do their jobs, the harder it is for them

to do a good job.

Minimizing the need for customizationDon’t forget, it takes a certain amount of tweaking and adjusting to get

your monitoring tools to work exactly the way you want them to and

show exactly the information you want to see. Doing this in multiple

tooling sets is inherently more difficult, and potentially problematic.

Consider setting alert thresholds. Having to set up alert and problem

notifications identically in two different systems increases the chances

of making a mistake. Again, mistakes in this area can mean lost revenue

and unhappy customers.

Finally, think about the role of monitoring during the actual

application-migration process. When moving an app from a private

data center to the cloud, the first step is to monitor that application

in the data center to get a baseline understanding of how the application

is performing. Then, during and after the migration, you can refer to

that baseline to determine if the migration has introduced any problems

into the system. Of course, that works best if you’re using the same

monitoring system before, during, and after the migration.

The hybrid cloud continues to evolve, so even if your organization

isn’t currently dealing with a particularly complex cloud environment,

that may not always be the case. Your monitoring solution should be

designed to make it easy to deal with whatever cloud challenges you’ll

face, both now and in the future.




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About New RelicNew Relic is a software analytics company that delivers real-time insights to more than 500,000 users and 13,000 paid business accounts. As a

multi-tenant SaaS platform, the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud helps companies securely monitor their production software in virtually any

environment, without having to build or maintain dedicated infrastructure. New Relic helps companies improve application performance, create

delightful customer experiences, and realize business success. Learn more at newrelic.com.

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