More than ever before, businesses are increasingly using cloud platforms to speed up innovation, reduce costs, enhance reliability, to avoid risking data loss and increase flexibility. Among the various types of cloud models you can choose, there’s one that ensures optimal cost-efficiency, performance, and flexibility: the hybrid cloud. It has fast become the de facto standard cloud model.
Hybrid cloud is a composition of different cloud environments, public cloud as well as private, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. To put it simply, a hybrid cloud is a mash-up of cloud resources from different platform and locations.
The advantage of the hybrid cloud model is that it allows workloads and data to move between private and public clouds in a flexible way as demands, needs, and costs change, giving businesses greater flexibility and more options for data deployment and use. In other words, if you have some IT resources in-house that you are replicating or augmenting with an external vendor, congratulations, you have a hybrid cloud!
I often receive questions about moving workloads between different clouds. Some requests are made because companies are switching cloud vendors and want to move virtual machines from one cloud platform to another for example VMware to OpenStack, Oracle to VMware or AWS to Azure. Other companies ask because they want their Disaster Recovery or Cloud Backup rethought. Others want to be able to move workloads daily to profit from changing prices and innovations speeds of different cloud vendors and their platforms. For Whatever reason, we help companies to migrate their cloud resources in the most effective and safe way possible.
These migration requests reveal a huge difference between a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud environment: a multi-cloud environment consists of separated cloud platforms with their own siloed technologies that pose serious thresholds between platforms. While a hybrid cloud functions as if it one cloud without thresholds so workloads can (near) freely roam between the different platforms without having to switch management and orchestration tooling.
Before moving virtual machines between cloud providers, proper planning is required: choosing the right cloud providers, elaborating migration stages and off course security is an important concern during and after migrating between platforms. When you move from cloud to cloud, you should off course be sure that your infrastructure is safely stored and encrypted.
With Fairbanks we have solutions and steps defined to take full control of your workloads and multi cloud resources to create and utilize your own hybrid cloud. With no security risks; no matter the size and no matter the clouds you are using or migrating between. We can provide these technologies continuously or temporarily too for a one time migration from one cloud provider to another.
The underlying technology follows these basic steps:
1. Prepare for migration: We choose the level of cloud integration.
2. Start replication: We start background replication of business applications, machines data and metadata. We do this without any performance impact.
3. Store data: All the data is stored in a cloud native format using volumes and snapshots of the target cloud infrastructure.
4. Orchestration: An automated orchestration launches the fully operational business applications on the target cloud.
5. Test migrations: We run as much as needed number of tests in an isolated VPC, then run a set of functional and performance tests without performance impact.
6. Final cutover: We launch a final migration (cutover) within a small and predictable maintenance window to update the machines with the latest deltas.
So Fairbanks helps companies with any to any cloud migration that supports all cloud platforms to minimize downtime and risks and creates an actual hybrid cloud platform. The process of the cloud migrations is undertaken in a fully automated mode which speeds up the delivery of services, reduces costs, and eliminates the possibility of human errors.
Are you using the same steps for cloud to cloud migrations or do you use a completely different way of working?
