Lots of organizations worldwide have the goal of an open hybrid cloud. The ability to build applications that work with multiple public cloud providers as well as on-premise virtualization services without vendor lock-in has many advantages:
- The ability to move workloads from one cloud provider to another.
- The freedom to move workloads in-house and off-premises as needed.
- The ability to coordinate tasks running in different clouds.
For a definition of open hybrid cloud, we turn to Red Hat's Eric Schabell:
Hybrid cloud is a combination of one or more public and private clouds with at least a degree of workload portability, integration, orchestration, and unified management.
It's important to make the distinction between open hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. A hybrid cloud features coordination between the tasks running in the different environments. Multi-cloud, on the other hand, simply uses different clouds without coordinating or orchestrating tasks among them.
Red Hat solutions are certified on all major cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. As you're defining your hybrid cloud strategy, you can be confident that you won't be going it alone as you work with a cloud provider. You won't be the first person to try things on Cloud x; you'll have the promise of a proven provider that works with your hybrid architecture.
In addition, building on Red Hat OpenShift gives you all the advantages of our open source, enterprise-grade Kubernetes distribution. That's great, but what's even better is that OpenShift runs on all the major cloud platforms. For example, Red Hat and Microsoft announced Azure Red Hat OpenShift at Red Hat Summit three months ago, and IBM recently announced support for OpenShift on IBM Cloud Private.
As you start (or continue) your journey to an open hybrid cloud, here are some useful resources:
- Red Hat CTO Chris Wright has a great forward-thinking article: "What's next for Kubernetes and hybrid cloud." Highly recommended.
- Articles that explain the basic concepts:
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- "What is hybrid cloud" is a great place to start.
- The article "What is multi-cloud?" clarifies the differences between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud in detail.
- For even more information, "Public cloud vs. private cloud (and also hybrid cloud)" is very useful.
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- At Red Hat Summit 2018, Eric Schabell gave a talk called "Three pitfalls everyone should avoid with hybrid cloud." The slides and a link to the video are available on Eric's website.
- And, at Red Hat Summit 2019, Eric presented another popular session: "Three more pitfalls everyone should avoid with hybrid cloud." Again, the slides and a link to a video are on Eric's website.
- Moving on to more practical details, the articles "Why choose Red Hat for cloud-native development?" and "Why build a Red Hat cloud?" have great information for anyone looking to get started.
We hope these articles and videos help you move forward on your hybrid cloud journey. As always, stay tuned to the Red Hat Developers website for the latest news, tips, and tutorials. Good luck!
Last updated: December 1, 2023
