Thinking About Migrating to Hybrid Cloud?

This blog aims to give you a short overview of Hybrid Cloud, its benefits and limitations, how to tackle these limitations and finally - why the Payara Platform is the right choice if you are thinking about migrating your business to Hybrid Cloud.

If you don’t have a clear understanding of what a Hybrid Cloud is,  you are not alone. Its definition has been muddled by various cloud vendors, contributing to the misunderstanding and resulting in something that is vague and unclear. 

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Although there is no single, agreed-upon definition for Hybrid Cloud, the most widely accepted definition is that a Hybrid Cloud is a cloud computing solution that utilises both public cloud resources (via providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) and an on-premises data-centre or private cloud resources. These resources are usually orchestrated by third-party software that allows users to centrally manage workloads and move data between public and private clouds on-demand. This provides greater flexibility and scalability for business as it grows. Hybrid Cloud is the interconnectivity between private and public clouds. Without this interconnection, you have two clouds functioning independently of one another.

Learn more on how Payara Platform is Hybrid Cloud-Friendly

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid Cloud provides a solution that combines the flexibility and innovation of a public cloud with the security and stability of a private cloud. A public cloud provides a great environment for development as it provides easy access to libraries, tools, and extra resources; however, it offers less security and stability than a standard private cloud. Ideally, you need a balance between flexibility provided by a public cloud and security provided by a private cloud. Sensitive components need to be placed into a secure private cloud, whilst less sensitive components can be placed in a public cloud.

The primary motivation to migrate to a Hybrid Cloud is it grants security, flexibility, and scalability. On-premises or private cloud infrastructure makes your company responsible for the cost and accountability of managing it, adding additional resources to it will require advance planning and increased expenses. This is where public cloud elements of Hybrid Cloud provides on-demand and temporary use of the cloud when demand exceeds the resources available in the private cloud, allowing the benefit of virtually infinite resources available in the cloud. Your company becomes more agile and can deal with any unanticipated loads.

Limitations of Hybrid Cloud

Despite its benefits, there are a few challenges and limitations to implementing a Hybrid Cloud approach. The biggest challenge of setting up a Hybrid Cloud, especially for smaller companies, is the cost.  Getting it set up correctly also involves having the correct tools and experience to implement it, which, more often than not, requires getting external help involved. Bringing in these skills can be costly, as can the time and expense of retraining your existing team, which can counteract the cost benefits traditionally associated with the cloud. You may also face issues with the compatibility and integration of your infrastructure.

How Do You Tackle Limitations to Experience Hybrid Cloud Benefits?

Detailed planning and evaluation before you migrate, and effective monitoring once you've implemented the approach makes it possible to overcome the limitations and experience the benefits of Hybrid Cloud. By analysing your existing infrastructure and applications, identifying areas where compatibility and integration may be an issue, you can plan to overcome these challenges before you deploy to your new architecture. 

Because the Payara Platform is cloud-native, you can lift and shift your applications and migrate to the Hybrid Cloud with your developer's existing Java EE skillset. There is no need to rewrite the code or use an entirely new framework to migrate.

The easiest way to guarantee all challenges are covered is to engage consultants with tangible experience in creating and implementing Hybrid Cloud migration strategies. By doing this you can ensure that the right planning and evaluation has taken place to before migration and that this approach is the right one for you before it is implemented. Payara Enterprise and Migration & Project Support customers can take advantage of Payara Accelerator, our comprehensive cloud migration service tailors a solution to your organisation's needs, ensuring you will face fewer issues after deployment and are able to reap the benefits of the cloud sooner. 

If your organisation is considering a hybrid approach for its infrastructure, get in touch and find out how Payara Accelerator can help you with your cloud migration.

Learn more on how Payara Accelerator can help with cloud migration

Why the Payara Platform?

Since the Payara Platform is cloud-native and optimised for production environments, it can be deployed in any environment: on cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. It’s designed with support for major cloud platforms, ensuring the Payara Platform is compatible with the services you’re already using, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and the Google Cloud Platform. This was the reason why a lot of our customer migrated to the Payara Platform, read more about this on our customer case studies.

The Payara Platform works with a variety of architectural styles including serverless systems, reactive systems, and microservices. It’s an ideal platform for running Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications in the cloud. 

Applications running on Payara Platform can benefit from many cloud optimizations and flexible configuration options that are already present in Payara Server and Payara Micro. On top of that, both Payara Platform runtimes provide a lot of monitoring services out of the box, thus making it easy to understand what's going on even in the cloud environment. Distributed tracing of requests between services is remarkably helpful to understand the communication flow between multiple services managed by a Hybrid Cloud.

Learn more on why Payara Platform is the right choice for the cloud.