Varinder Kumar, VMware Sr. Director, IT Application Operations,
Manas Singh, VMware Manager, Platform Engineering – Application Operations
Cloud computing has become the backbone of IT infrastructure for an overwhelming number of businesses worldwide. Among the various cloud deployment models, a private cloud/public cloud approach offers distinct advantages and use cases. Yet for many organizations, the challenge with a hybrid approach lies in providing consistent user experiences for all personas who interact with these deployments across both cloud environments. When greater consistency is achieved, IT teams are better positioned to enhance user productivity, minimize the learning curve, and harness the full potential of cloud computing.
The back story
A few years back, VMware IT deployed all applications in a private cloud powered by VMware products. When there was a need to provide 99.99 percent or higher availability for our SaaS offerings, we envisioned deploying a few critical services to the public cloud. Treading carefully into this new paradigm, we implemented focused strategies to create private cloud experiences that simulated those of the public cloud such that our personas—whether end users, operators, developers, DevOps or others—would never notice the difference between the two.
Since user experience for all personas was of prime importance to us, our aim was to employ technologies, processes, and products that worked seamlessly on all types of deployments. The experiment was a success, with end users realizing a minimal learning curve in order to obtain the productivity advantages of a hybrid environment.
Our winning approach
These six key factors drove our successful strategy:
- Unified management solution
We relied on technologies that worked both on-premises and in the public cloud to establish a unified control plane. We leveraged VMware Tanzu® Mission Control™ for provisioning our Kubernetes clusters, thereby making the provisioning and management a simple endeavor.
- Automation and orchestration
Since all the applications are deployed via Kubernetes, the orchestration responsibility was delegated to Kubernetes. This eliminated the need to write a custom automation for controlling the applications. In addition, we expanded our DevOps pipeline access to the public cloud. Thus, there was no change in the deployment process other than the aforementioned small learning curve for our personas.
- Monitoring and analytics
The control plane is centralized within the hybrid cloud deployment. To ensure efficient monitoring and debugging capabilities, it incorporates log aggregation and monitoring tools. We leveraged VMware Aria Operations™ for Logs and VMware Aria Operations™ for Applications to offer a unified and comprehensive view across both cloud deployments, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.
- Security and compliance
We ensured that the same set of security rules was applied to all clouds. From an application perspective, we used a build once and deploy multiple strategy to mitigate any differences that might occur, depending on where the application was deployed. All base images came from the VMware Application Catalog for consistency.
- Data portability and interoperability
Data portability was achieved by leveraging enterprise tools to provide real-time data replication to the public cloud. This improved the data availability without reliance on custom and hard-to-maintain automation.
- Single sign-on and identity management
VMware hybrid cloud deployments leverage on-premises-to-public-cloud direct connectivity, making core services like authentication and DNS readily available in the public cloud deployment. An additional benefit is that core services policies can be duplicated rather than created from scratch.
And the results were . . .
In summary, as cloud technology continues to evolve, the convergence of private and public clouds is becoming increasingly achievable, offering more seamless and unified experiences for users and IT teams alike. Providing consistent experiences across both cloud models is a pivotal step in harnessing the full potential of cloud computing in today’s dynamic business landscape. In our case, by prioritizing the experience for all user personas, we achieved a smooth integration with our on-premises deployment in a remarkably brief period of time. This substantially augmented our on-premises setup while increasing critical applications availability to 99.99 percent.
There’s a lot more to this topic than is presented here. That’s why we encourage you to contact your account team to schedule a briefing with us. No sales pitch, no marketing. Just straightforward peer conversations revolving around your company’s unique requirements. Also, listen to the podcast to learn more.
