Like life in general, IT has ups and downs. The users of a business application might be highly active throughout the workday, then go quiet after hours. Various industries see seasonal spikes in demand—think tax filing or holiday shopping. More vexingly, an unlikely series of events could send a flood of requests that nobody anticipated.
Whether predictable or random, scalability issues pose a major challenge for IT professionals. The goal is to deliver reliability and consistency of service, at peak and off peak.
Scalability is a major reason people turn to a hybrid cloud strategy to better manage those peaks and valleys. Using the shared infrastructure of a public cloud in combination with on-premises infrastructure means more elasticity and scalability.
To fully realize the promise of the hybrid cloud, you need to divide applications into services that are portable and quick to deploy. Increasingly, that means using Kubernetes to orchestrate applications in containers.
Kubernetes, an open source project that grew out of software Google used to manage its massive public-facing applications, is built for scale.
Kubernetes lets you define how many instances the application should have, and to automatically scale up and down based on user demand. Kubernetes and Linux containers help ensure apps perform consistently wherever they are deployed.
With Kubernetes and the Kubernetes scheduler, an organization can run multiple applications across shared infrastructure—even splitting the workloads across on-premises and multiple public clouds. That makes it possible to automate the scaling of different apps, up and down, to make more efficient use of resources.
Kubernetes can’t do it all, though. IT organizations that run a hybrid cloud environment will have to navigate the complexities involved with the public cloud infrastructure they might end up using. Reliability, security, and performance questions are key.
And with multiple cloud environments, you’ll find different management and development interfaces for each one. Each public cloud has different features, pricing models, and management interfaces that your IT teams will have to be trained on and operate in. The differences can even impact the portability of your applications across environments.
The challenges of a hybrid cloud strategy are best tackled in the planning stages. Choosing the right platforms, and the right partners, are key to finding success in dealing with the ups and downs of IT scalability.
Keep learning about a hybrid cloud Kubernetes strategy on the Red Hat Blog: Containers and Kubernetes can be essential to a hybrid cloud computing strategy. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/containers-and-kubernetes-can-be-essential-hybrid-cloud-computing-strategy