Hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration, and management across 2 or more environments. Depending on whom you ask, those environments may need to include:
- At least 1 private cloud and at least 1 public cloud
- 2 or more private clouds
- 2 or more public clouds
- A bare-metal or virtual environment connected to at least 1 cloud—public or private
These varying requirements are an evolution from the earlier age of cloud computing, where the differences between public clouds and private clouds were easily defined by location and ownership. But today’s cloud types are far more complex, because location and ownership are abstract considerations. For example:
Public clouds traditionally ran off-premises, but public cloud providers are now running cloud services on their clients’ on-premise data centers.
Private clouds traditionally ran on-premises, but organizations are now building private clouds on rented, vendor-owned data centers located off-premises.
This is why it can be more helpful to define hybrid cloud computing by what it does. All hybrid clouds should:
- Connect multiple computers through a network.
- Consolidate IT resources.
- Scale out and quickly provision new resources.
- Be able to move workloads between environments.
- Incorporate a single, unified management tool.
- Orchestrate processes with the help of automation.
