Enterprise environments can be complex and incorporate a mix of infrastructures, including on-premises data centers, cloud services, and edge networks. By leveraging both cloud and on-premises infrastructures via hybrid cloud management, organizations can support more varied and demanding workloads and take advantage of the scalability of the cloud.
When creating hybrid clouds with AWS services, there are two primary solutions organizations can deploy—VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS Outposts, and AWS Storage Gateway. In this post, we’ll review these solutions and how you can best implement them. Finally, we’ll show how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help simplify the migration and management of AWS hybrid cloud environments.
In this article, you will learn:
An AWS hybrid architecture has four main pillars: device management, monitoring and auditing, identity management, and hybrid cloud management.
This is a service that manages on-premises devices, including compute, networking and storage. It also provides management interfaces for provisioning, managing and monitoring on-premises resources.
In AWS, this function is often managed by the customer, typically using platforms like VMware vSphere or OpenStack. Organizations can use AWS Systems Manager for tasks like remote control, patch management, and managing an inventory of on-premise infrastructure, and AWS OpsWorks for server automation based on Chef and Puppet.
A critical function for the hybrid cloud is to consistently monitor health and produce alerts, logs and audits for compliance purposes. This is made possible by two Amazon services:
AWS Directory Services allow organizations to manage user directories for hybrid clouds, using tools like Amazon Cloud Directory and Microsoft Active Directory. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Cognito integrate with identity providers (IdPs) using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) or Open-ID Connect (OIDC).
AWS Output provides a unified management layer for the hybrid cloud, allowing applications and workloads to consume services like compute, storage, and networking, and making it possible to provision and manage hybrid cloud resources. Outposts provides the same APIs and tools for on-premises and cloud-based Amazon services.
VMware Cloud on AWS is a service offered via a partnership between AWS and VMware. It is an integrated service that enables you to migrate and extend on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to AWS. It operates via the Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service on bare-metal servers.
Using VMware Cloud with AWS can provide several benefits, including:
Outposts is a fully managed service that enables you to transfer the AWS operating model to any on-premise environment or data center you choose. This transfer includes infrastructure, APIs, support, services, operations, and management tools.
You can deploy a variety of AWS services on Outposts, including AWS Elastic Block Store (AWS EBS), EC2, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and databases. You can then combine these services with analytics services, such as Amazon EMR.
AWS Outposts can provide several benefits, including:
AWS Storage Gateway is an on-premises storage solution that you can use to create a hybrid environment. It enables you to smoothly integrate Amazon cloud storage services with existing on-prem systems. You have the option to deploy this solution as either a hardware appliance or a virtual machine.
Once you deploy Storage Gateway, you can use it to connect your on-premises systems to a range of AWS services, including EBS, S3, and Glacier. You can also use it to enable access from AWS to your on-site resources. For example, you can connect monitoring, logging, or machine learning services and apply these services to on-premises data.
Storage Gateway uses standard access protocols for easy integration and supports SMB, NFS, and iSCSI environments. It also uses local caching, enabling you to store frequently accessed cloud data on site for lower latency use. Learn more in our AWS Storage Gateway: Connecting Your On-Premise Storage to the Amazon Cloud blog.
There are multiple reasons an organization might adopt a hybrid cloud infrastructure. The most common use cases for hybrid cloud deployments include:
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides Cloud Manager, a UI and APIs for management, automation and orchestration, supporting hybrid & multi-cloud architectures.