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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get what hybrid cloud is and how much of it is marketing and how much is actually useful tools, services and/or infrastructure.

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Cloud was a great option in the beginning because oh the elasticity, less cost and effort to maintain (in comparison to on prem). But, as companies as AWS, Google, MS and IBM worked to lock their clients in, costs have risen and the cloud economic benefit faded, some companies tried multicloud, that worked for a while and now some companies are actually moving some of their infrastructure back to on prem, so there is the hybrid cloud case. What I've seen is companies covering their base demand with on prem and leave the cloud to deal with the elastic part of their demand. If costs change sides, they can also use more cloud and less on prem and vice versa.

I agree to some point with the other commenters. But the reality is that almost every enterprise of any size will be hybrid cloud for quite some time if not forever. It’s impossible to lift and shift everything at once which means you need the infrastructure to connect those environments regardless.

On top of that you’ve still go some applications that run on platforms that just aren’t compatible and will need to be either rebuilt or left to run on-premise indefinitely.

Additionally, getting back to their other comments. I think there is some logic around data being viewed as “heavy” given the egress costs on most clouds. Having one place which you can easily upload data to any new environment that pops up for cheaper seems like a decent idea. Then again, a lot of money related things can be solved by simple contract negotiation, so maybe it’s not worth it.

> you need the infrastructure to connect those environments regardless

What does that infrastructure look like? What are some examples?

One example would be an on-prem object storage device that's capable of replicating data to AWS S3.

One example would be to use “interconnects” which link your data center to the cloud through a high capacity (maybe low latency?) “dedicated” line. So basically you have private IP connectivity between your DC and a virtual private cloud (VPC) so your workloads “think” they’re on the same private IP network. I thought of interconnects as beefy VPNs (but this may not be accurate, just a helpful mental aid).

Note: I’m using mostly GCP terminology, https://cloud.google.com/hybrid-connectivity

Basically having mixed deployments across cloud environments, with services that ease application management and deployment across them.

Sure one can do that today, but consulting shops and cloud vendors need new products for keeping the board happy with exponential growth.

The other commenters mention multi-cloud use cases but another case is prem-cloud hybrid. You may want some of your business on prem for whatever reason but be able to move workloads to various clouds and back, for price, load, or whatever reason.

So if that’s the set-up (on-prem + a cloud provider), what’s being sold as a hybrid cloud solution - some services that allow you to manage them better or something else? What are some examples?

Chips that are architecturally similar / behave like the cloud platforms, and they are claiming it is designed to allow a higher container density (i.e. run more containers at once, where some of those containers might have very little activity).

AWS is probably further along than the others throwing offerings at the wall. They let you do things like have a single api that can manage your stuff on your prem and in their cloud. It can look like containers, like VM's, like a VPN, all sorts of options. Sometimes it sticks to the wall.

https://aws.amazon.com/hybrid

AWS Outpost and GCP Anthos are examples of hybrid cloud services.

At first cloud providers created tools to make it easier to migrate/connect your on prem to your cloud environments. I’m guessing what usually happened was that some workloads would get migrated but others would remain on prem (for various reasons) so cloud providers started building products that made “your Data Center in our cloud”. Ie deploy cloud-like services within your Data Center so your developers have access to the same interface regardless of where the workload is deployed.

It's mostly around federation and abstraction of the lock in's of a particular cloud provider.

For example, I might want to run my own hardware for a certain reason and then also run workloads on AWS, but I don't want to have to manage different sets of API's , auth methods etc.

It’s about putting things in the cheapest place with the lowest risk.

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