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Every cloud is unique. Private clouds are one-of-a-kind and there are thousands of public cloud providers. There's no one-size-fits-all cloud architecture. The way you organize your cloud resources and build a hybrid cloud will be as unique as your fingerprint. But there are a few basic principles that correspond to 2 general ways of building a hybrid cloud environment: The traditional way and the modern way.

Hybrid clouds used to be the result of literally connecting a private cloud envrionment to a public cloud environment using massive, complex iterations of middleware. You could build that private cloud on your own, or you could use prepackaged cloud infrastructure like OpenStack. You would also need a public cloud, like one of the few listed below:

Finally, you would need to link the public cloud to the private cloud. Moving huge amounts of resources among these environments require powerful middleware, or a preconfigured VPN that many cloud service providers give customers as part of their subscription packages:

Todays hybrid clouds are architected differently. Instead of connecting the environments themselves, modern IT teams build hybrid clouds by focusing on the portability of the apps that run in the environments.

Think about it like this: Instead of building a local 2-lane road (fixed middleware instances) to connect 2 interstate highways (a public cloud and a private cloud), you could instead focus on creating an all-purpose vehicle that can drive, fly, and float. Either strategy still gets you from one place to another, but there's a lot less permitting, construction, permanancy, and ecological impact if you focus on a universally capable vehicle.

Modern IT teams build hybrid clouds by focusing on the carthe app. They develop and deploy apps as collections of small, independent, and loosely coupled services. By running the same operating system in every IT environment and managing everything through a unified platform, the app's universality is extended to the environments below it. In more practical terms, a hybrid cloud can be the result of:

Using the same operating system abstracts all the hardware requirements, while the orchestration platform abstracts all the app requirements. This creates an interconnected, consistent computing environment where apps can be moved from one environment to another without maintaining a complex map of APIs that breaks every time apps are updated or you change cloud providers.

This interconnectivity allows development and operations teams to work together in a DevOps model: A process by which teams work collaboratively across integrated environments using a microservice architecture supported by containers.

Originally posted here:
What is hybrid cloud? - Red Hat