What to Consider When Choosing Between Hybrid Cloud Hosting Solutions

Many enterprises are now moving towards hybrid cloud architecture. This means they need to update their infrastructure. In particular, they need to find a hybrid cloud hosting solution. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what to consider when choosing between hybrid cloud hosting solutions.

Where is the vendor legally based?

Vendors generally specify that any contractual disputes are to be settled in accordance with the law where they are located. In practical terms, this means that the further they are from you, the more inconvenient (and expensive) it would be to take legal action against them.

Even for enterprises, it generally makes sense to use a vendor that’s legally headquartered fairly close to you. At a minimum, you should be confident that a court in a vendor’s home location would give you a fair hearing in a reasonable timescale.

Where are the vendor’s data centers located?

There are three reasons why it’s important to know where, exactly, a vendor’s data centers are located. Firstly, you need to be confident that your data is being held in a place where the importance of data security is recognized in law. It’s advisable to be confident about this even if you’re planning to run your private cloud yourself and keep all your private data there.

Secondly, you need to be able to assess your level of risk in a disaster recovery situation. If your vendor has all of their data centers very close to you, then any major issue (i.e. a power outage, natural disaster, etc.) that affects you could also affect them. You want at least some of their facilities to be at a safe distance.

Thirdly, the location of your vendor’s servers will probably influence service delivery to some extent. This means it can be very useful for your vendor to have data centers near your main customer bases/employee hubs. This will minimize the time it takes to serve them resources.

Does the vendor have experience in hybrid cloud hosting solutions?

Once you’ve gained experience in running a hybrid cloud, you may decide you feel comfortable using a vendor that’s new to this area. When you’re just getting started, however, it’s strongly advisable to use a vendor that has hybrid cloud hosting experience and knows what they’re doing.

In fact, you may want to look specifically for vendors that offer dedicated hybrid cloud hosting solutions. These are generally the easiest way to implement a hybrid cloud. They can therefore be useful for implementing a hybrid cloud (relatively) quickly and easily.

The price of this simplicity, however, is that you become subject to restrictions. In particular, there’s a high chance that you’ll effectively find yourself locked into a specific vendor’s platform-management system. You may also find yourself required to use hardware specified by the vendor.

These constraints arguably reduce the benefit of using hybrid cloud hosting solutions. It’s therefore often preferable to wean yourself off them as quickly as possible. That means you need a vendor that can also support the use of third-party, cloud-neutral tooling systems. Alternatively, you need to be prepared to find a new vendor when you update your systems.

Does the vendor support third-party IaC templates?

In general, third-party IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code) templates will work on any cloud, provided that the vendor permits their use. IaC templates offered by public cloud vendors, by contrast, tend only to work in that public cloud. Having to change your IaC templates according to where you are deploying your workload can be a real cause of friction for businesses. It’s also clearly vulnerable to human error.

What support does the vendor offer for Kubernetes?

Building a hybrid cloud with Kubernetes saves you the pain of having to navigate your way through the maze of deployment and management processes on different infrastructure platforms. Just how much pain it saves you depends on just how effectively your vendor supports Kubernetes.

In particular, you need to know which specific features the vendor’s Kubernetes service provides. You also need to know how effectively the service can integrate with any third-party infrastructure you want to use. In fact, it’s advisable to know how well it integrates with third-party infrastructure in general, in case you want to make changes.
What specific networking options does the vendor support?

Not only do you need to know what specific networking options the vendor supports, but you also need to know exactly how they work. Even small differences in how services work can lead to significant differences in both operations and cost.

What is the vendor’s fee structure?

In particular, what are the vendor’s egress fees? How do they work with the sort of hybrid infrastructure you want to build?

Read More:

The Advantages And Disadvantages Of A Hybrid Cloud Solution

What To Think About When Considering Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure