Hybrid cloud initiatives are now part of most modern enterprises. As a result, effective approaches for anything from storage to big data as a service have expanded from being mainly for solution architects to becoming part of the enterprise-wide IT department. The main focus of any hybrid cloud initiative is to provide a best-fit deployment of IT elements in the right environment whether on premises, in a private cloud, or from a hosted public cloud environments. Now there are many architects designing the infrastructure.

Solution Architects

Solution architects typically handle the most critical, revenue-generating applications in the enterprise. Application performance is paramount for the enterprise to respond to digital business requirements, and their digital presence is now more important than the physical, a reversal of where business used to take place.

Think of the just the banking industry — almost all business has shifted from walk-in locations almost exclusively online. You can now sign and acquire a mortgage without stepping out of the house.

Solution architects must design for mobile apps, websites, and internet of things (IoT) devices that run the business and they must always be thinking about how to deliver value faster. They should be keen on innovating and reducing the amount of overhead required for a fine-tuned distributed application architecture that scales on demand.

Without a hybrid cloud approach, solution architects will fall behind the competition. Adopting a hybrid cloud approach works toward maximizing resources without compromising performance. The most successful solution architects figure out how to match the right capacity at the right time for who needs it the most.

One of the best practice implementations for hybrid cloud is to allow for bursting when demand spikes. With this architecture, a load balancer can direct some web traffic to a server location that might be scaling in a public cloud on demand. Some of the backend resources that support that app can also be scaled similarly.

IT Architects

IT architects work with the nuts and bolts of the enterprise, focusing mainly on the infrastructure and network capacity to serve the needs of all aspects of the private and public networking for all teams within the organization. Their work is associated with both the internal supporting applications and the external revenue-generating applications.

IT architects are typically the gatekeepers of all IT resources and must ensure quality and evaluate new technologies before implementing them in a production setting.

As many enterprises are looking to migrate all or parts of their data centers to public cloud provider environments, savvy IT architects adopt a hybrid cloud approach that recognizes which infrastructure is best suited for the cloud and what should remain on-premises. They want visibility and control so that they can address any IT issue without having to painstakingly track down additional problems that may arise from loosely governed ad-hoc environments, sometimes referred to as shadow IT.

Cloud Architects

Some enterprises have cloud architects who assist with both the solutions and IT architect teams. This dedicated role can emerge from either of these teams in order to provide more of a deep dive into understanding the specific cloud provider platforms so that they can make recommendations for application development and deployment, as well as options for storage and big data processing.  
Enterprises benefit from having the expertise of a cloud architect who can keep up with the latest trends in cloud computing technologies from multiple vendors. They can provision, test, and manage cloud solution infrastructure from any environment and can weigh the pros and cons of different cloud solutions. Cloud architects can be involved in any legal contractual negotiations with providers and the procurement process.

They’ll be who the enterprise calls to make that sure any hybrid cloud solution is designed with both security compliance and high performance in mind.

CloudBolt for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Initiatives

Leaders in enterprise IT know that having a centralized platform for managing the provisioning of all IT resources can make a big difference in managing hybrid cloud complexity and delivering value faster.

CloudBolt provides an optimal hybrid cloud platform that is vendor agnostic and has a plugin architecture for extensibility to almost any environment that has an API. Any of the three architects described in this post can take advantage of the CloudBolt platform for centralized visibility and control of any resource they want to consider as part of the architecture that they manage.

To understand more about how CloudBolt’s platform can help any hybrid cloud architect, check out our Product Overview

Background

With over 20 years of experience and hundreds of thousands of mortgages issued, this leading mortgage originator attributes their success in this highly competitive business to a relentless focus on a customer experience that makes getting a mortgage as simple as possible.

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For enterprise IT and hybrid cloud environments, IP address management (IPAM) solutions have become increasingly important, as both security and availability issues can take down the most critical aspects of any digital business. If IP addresses end up in the wrong hands or they are not properly managed and assigned throughout the enterprise, the results could be devastating.

IP addresses provide a unique identity to every single physical or logical node on a network, so that information can be sent to and from each device, real or virtual, and can be assigned by an IPAM or set manually to connect to a private or public network. The sooner IT administrators can recover from a breach based on an IP address issue the better. Otherwise, business is halted, and a troubleshooting nightmare begins.

DNS Overview: Names to IP Addresses

Enterprises use a domain name system (DNS) to translate their public domain name to an IP address. For example, if a company has an internet address on the web as “www.mycompany.com,” the DNS service translates that to a machine-readable public IP address *.

This public IP address then becomes the initial gatekeeper for all internet traffic going to the enterprise web servers or being sent from the enterprise web servers. This is all pretty simple so far, but there’s a lot more complexity behind that web server needed to deliver digital value from within the enterprise.

DHCP Service and IPAM Behind the Scenes

In addition to the public IP address that an enterprise has for their corporate website, there are usually thousands of private IP addresses associated with the enterprise, behind a firewall, and configured as one or more private networks and subnetting. This means that there’s not only traffic coming to and from the main website for the enterprise, but also lots of other traffic in an enterprise that never goes through the “digital storefront”, which finds its way around using private IP address configurations.

This enables the work of the digital business. Addressing helps file transfers and computer processing between on-premises servers, databases, applications, services, and internet of things (IoT) devices to all the public cloud provider infrastructure resources used by most enterprises, but not those physically located on any site.

Every endpoint in the enterprise must have an IP address unique to the network where it resides. This is all managed by an enterprise domain host controller protocol (DHCP) service. The endpoints that need IP addresses can be workstation computers, servers, switches, routers, load balancers, printers, and wireless devices, but that is by no means an exhaustive list. A DHCP service must be able to handle IP addressing without creating conflicts across the entire enterprise. Most enterprises turn to an IPAM to make sure that IP addressing is handled smoothly.

As with anything else in a modern digital ecosystem of interdependent resources, the more the IP addressing process is automated, the less room there is for errors.

How does this relate to a hybrid cloud management platform?

Imagine a scenario where different teams within a large organization relied on their own DNS or DHCP services, but did not coordinate across the whole enterprise. There might be different policies set for security, and the environments could be changing very quickly without any oversight. If any IP address has a conflict with another as a duplicate, the information flow stops.

If you’re not able to catch IP address issues before they impact end users, IT service requests start to pile up and critical digital work is halted. The ability to address and manage all of this complexity is best handled by an enterprise-grade IPAM such as those from Infoblox and Solarwinds.

At CloudBolt we help you make sure you manage all IP address configuration from one central location. This way, you’ll be able to provision all your infrastructure resources, such as load balancers, web servers, app servers, and database servers, so that they are properly addressed without a hitch.

We integrate out of the box with Infoblox or Solarwinds IPAM, and you can also specify another IPAM system with a plugin.

Some enterprises drop off the “www” to what is called a “naked” domain name for simplicity. However, most enterprises who do this will typically redirect a naked domain like Facebook.com to www.facebook.com for technical reasons, while some marketers believe the shortened domain name has more appeal.

Dale Carnegie taught our grandparents 80 years ago that a “person’s name is to that person the sweetest sound in any language.” For IT organizations the sweetest sound is often…a hostname.

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For enterprise IT, just about anything can be scripted and automated for infrastructure to be provisioned and started, stopped, deleted, restored, replicated, and more.

The scripted part can be anything from a command line call to an API of the infrastructure provider to using a scripting program like Python to configure some logical actions. There are explicit configuration tools for part of the process to provision infrastructure, as well as full-blown, built-in support by cloud management platforms (CMPs) that can integrate with all of these scripting methods. This way, once configured the user points and clicks from a web-based user interface.   

At the enterprise level, a lot of developers have converged on these three configuration tools to do the upfront scripting that creates the logic to assemble and integrate infrastructure and application stacks for development, testing, and production:

Some enterprises use Terraform, an Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach, to get what used to be bare metal provisioning. This IaC platform treats the stand up of infrastructure much like the process used by developers to develop, test, and release code using an agile or continuous delivery model for DevOps initiatives.

There’s a catch, though, for enterprises — IT operations teams often end up managing the infrastructure after it has gone through development and any test environments. They will hopefully be able to manage and update in coordination with the development or DevOps teams. It does not always go smoothly.

The more teams within the organization are updating and introducing more automation technologies, the more complex it can get. What if the “tribal knowledge” of one team who does the automation is not the same approach as others? I’ve heard the expression, “skunk-works project” to refer to some of these environments that have been developed but are not standardized across the organization. Uncovering who is responsible for what and how it was developed can be a nightmare as teams change over time.

The benefits of automation, when implemented properly from a centrally managed platform like CloudBolt as an enterprise hybrid cloud platform, can have huge benefits for IT operations teams, infrastructure teams, and application development teams.

The benefits of a centrally managed hybrid cloud management platform will help:

A cloud management platform (CMP) is part of a larger cloud fabric orchestration strategy that typically helps enterprise IT control and manage the consumption of IT cloud-computing resources from a central location for end users. The idea is that there’s a lot of complexity that needs to be controlled. There are so many ever-changing on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud resources to update, manage, and deliver. 

You can think of it like who gets what in a large school cafeteria. Some get the planned meal in a serving line. Some kids bring their own lunch but might buy a snack or a drink. There might be a salad bar or an a la carte section where you order a sandwich. Payment happens with pre-paid lunch cards, voucher cards for guests or kids on free lunches, and then, of course, the typical cash payment options.

A CMP has to manage complexity much the same. It’s about choices, who gets what, and how do they pay.

Here’s a brief summary of the key aspects of an enterprise CMP:

Enterprise IT must consider the pros and cons of adopting a CMP that can handle the diverse environments from both a legacy IT infrastructure and private and public cloud resources. They should also consider their new digital business objectives enabled by provisioning and orchestrating IT resources from one or more environments, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Nutanix Acropolis, or VMware.

The most significant value that enterprises can gain from a CMP is to enable cloud fabric orchestration that is vendor agnostic and can connect and deliver all these resources to the end user. It is an easy way to get what you need quickly without getting bogged down in the process, and a step towards ensuring you get the visibility, control, and automation you need to keep cloud waste to a minimum and increase cloud value.

If you’re interested in getting the absolute most out of your cloud environment, a good CMP should be a part of your overall strategy to maximize your cloud ROI.

Ready to take your CMP to the next level? Request a demo or learn how CloudBolt can help solve your cloud ROI problem.