Red Hat: The Ideal Hybrid Cloud is an Open Source Environment

Full-scale public cloud migrations are a rarity. In fact, 63% of surveyed IT leaders say they have a hybrid cloud infrastructure, and half of the remainder plan to go there over the next two years. Not all workloads are suited for public cloud and few organizations are willing or able to ditch all of their existing investments in legacy IT.

Many of these IT leaders are developing new cloud-native apps and cloud-enabling existing applications for the public cloud. Those efforts can help support innovation and manage costs. But the reality is that most will have to manage a hybrid infrastructure of on-premises and multiple public clouds.

It’s easy to see how hybrid cloud has become the favored infrastructure for enterprises. If a legacy app is becoming costly to maintain, or the organization no longer has the skills needed to keep it running smoothly, it makes sense to plan an alternative approach. If a legacy app is working well and requires little investment to continue doing so, IT leaders are not inclined to make a change just to make a change.

A hybrid cloud strategy provides an organization with the ability to choose the optimal solution for each task or workload. For example, you might use on-premises infrastructure to store sensitive data, and public cloud services for application development. You might use multiple public cloud vendors to meet a variety of local regulations, or shift workloads from one provider to another based on pricing and demand.

Deciding which public and private clouds are right for each workload is a complex issue, and what you choose today won’t always be the best solution tomorrow. It’s important not to limit future options. No one cloud provider or on-premises environment has everything you want, and too often, proprietary solutions can restrict your choices and adaptability in the future.

Open source platforms represent the best foundations for hybrid clouds. They provide organizations with consistency and flexibility across every environment with crucial services such as integration, data, and analytics to enable different apps. 

Linux, the open source operating system that revolutionized datacenter operations, enables all the major public clouds, and continues to power new cloud-native initiatives. Linux containers are now the preferred deployment option for cloud-native apps; according to one survey, the use of containers in production increased from 15% in 2018 to 84% in 2019.

The open source Kubernetes platform has emerged as the industry standard to manage and orchestrate containerized workloads. Kubernetes automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. It provides you with the ability to cluster together groups of hosts running Linux containers, spanning on-premise, public, private, or hybrid clouds.

The future of IT is hybrid, providing the ability to continuously deliver a mix of different services, deploy modern applications on the cloud of your choice, and maintain some on-premises workloads as needed. Open source platforms are the best way to ensure true choice.

To learn more about Red Hat’s approach to open hybrid cloud, click here.