What is Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud combines two or more cloud environments. Public and private clouds are combined in hybrid cloud installations, which may also involve on-premise legacy technology. For a cloud to be genuinely hybrid, these many cloud environments must be tightly integrated, basically acting as one united infrastructure. At least one public cloud is present in almost all hybrid clouds.
The main advantage of a hybrid cloud is its flexibility. A basic principle of a digital business is the necessity to adapt and shift course fast. To acquire the agility, it requires for a competitive advantage, your company may desire (or need) to integrate public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises resources.
Alibaba Cloud products for Hybrid Cloud
- Express Connect: Express Connect enables you to connect your data center to a virtual private cloud in a quick, stable, secure, and private manner (VPC). Express Connect circuits ensure safe data transmission, limit the risk of data breaches, and eliminate network jitters.
Some advantages of using Express Connect:
- Powered by the network virtualization technology of Alibaba Cloud, Express Connect allows networks to communicate with each other through direct, private, and high-speed connections. Network traffic does not traverse the Internet. Express Connect circuits ensure low network latency, low packet loss rate, and high throughput even if data is transmitted over a long distance
- Built on the high-quality infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud, Express Connect ensures stable and reliable communication between networks
- Express Connect enables communication at the network virtualization layer. Data transmission among different tenants is isolated. This reduces the risks of data breaches
- Cloud Enterprise Network: The Alibaba Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) is a highly available network built on Alibaba Cloud’s worldwide private network. CEN is designed to provide great performance and minimal latency. CEN establishes cross-region connections between virtual private clouds via transit routers (VPCs). This allows VPCs to interface with data centers, resulting in cloud networks that are flexible, stable, and enterprise-class
Some advantages of using CEN:
- You can use transit routers and bandwidth plans to connect VPCs in different regions to data centers. This allows networks to communicate on a global scale. In the same region, a transit router can connect to at most 200 VPCs. This allows you to expand networks.
- CEN provides low-latency and high-speed network transmission. In the same region, the data transfer rate can reach the maximum rate supported by the device port. Resources can communicate with each other on a global scale. Compared with data transmission over the Internet, network latency is greatly reduced.
- Transit routers support custom routing policies to meet the requirements of enterprise-class networking. For example, you can create a network topology that supports security zones, demilitarized zones, and service chaining.
- Smart Access Gateway: is a one-stop solution for connecting your private network to Alibaba Cloud. Securely, intelligently and securely connect your private network to Alibaba Cloud via SAG.
Some advantages of using Smart Access Gateway:
- With highly automatic configurations and zero-touch provisioning (ZTO), SAG automatically adapts the network topology changes
- Nearby access within a city through the Internet is implemented. Additionally, multiple local branches can access the Alibaba Cloud through the device-level or link-level active/standby mode.
- The local branches and the Alibaba Cloud are connected through an encrypted private network and the transmission over the Internet is also encrypted.
- VPN Gateway: VPN Gateway is an Internet-based service that securely and reliably connects enterprise data centers, office networks, and Internet terminals to virtual private clouds (VPCs) of Alibaba Cloud through encrypted channels.
Conclusion
Hybrid clouds have many uses. Your organization can use a private cloud for some services, a public cloud for others, or a public cloud as a backup for your private cloud. You can also use a public cloud to handle high-demand periods while maintaining most operations in a private cloud. With Alibaba Cloud connectivity products this can be achieved seamlessly.
