When planning to host an event such as a wedding, birthday party, graduation, or retirement party, you’ll consider the best venue based on the size of your party and what amenities you need. If it’s outdoors, you’ll want to consider a place that has rain or shine options. In some cases, you might be more focused on catering and drink options. Is it open bar or BYOB? You could even hire an event planner to do the initial research and orchestrate the event or you can do it all by yourself.
If all goes well, your event will be at the right price, in a location that works, and provides the kind of hospitality, entertainment, and food and drink that hits your target for success. If you don’t plan well or settle for a venue that is not ideal, then you might end up with a lot of upset people. It will be embarrassing to you as the host when some of your guests leave early or stay but are unhappy.
Considering the best execution venue for hybrid cloud environments is much like event planning. You will have varying levels of decision making that can be orchestrated based on a dedicated event planner or a single hybrid cloud management platform.
Orchestrating a Best Execution Venue
One of the biggest advantages of enabling a hybrid cloud platform is that, by design, there will be a lot of options for where to host resources. The choice to deploy resources will typically span across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises resources. A hybrid cloud strategy also provides for application architectures that will include a mix of resource locations based on the function of the service. You could have application services that run on demand in cloud environments while standard workloads occur on-premises in regularly scheduled batches. Storage can be located anywhere depending on where and when it’s needed.
All of these options can be orchestrated at the time of provisioning and can be based on criteria such as the cost, performance, or security level required of the resource. The level of orchestration can be as manual or as automated as you desire with just a little upfront planning.
A key component of any level of orchestration is that a single management platform has the ability to configure multiple ways to achieve an outcome. For example, consider the cost of resources in different public cloud environments. A single management platform can retrieve the cost of resources from that public cloud provider and do the same thing for other comparable environments before you even deploy the resources. After you preview the costs, you could then select to deploy them in the least expensive location.
Over time, when you consider where you want to provision resources based on cost, instead of having to preview the price before deploying the resources, you can programmatically orchestrate the placement. The platform automatically deploys the resources in the least-cost venue.
Best Execution Venue to Optimize Available Resources
In a more complex orchestration, you might want to deploy resources by evenly distributing new resources to available locations such as hypervisor clusters in your data center. In some cases, without a Best Execution Venue approach, users could be adding resources to existing clusters until that cluster becomes saturated and performance degrades for all the VMs competing for compute resources on that cluster.
Using a Best Execution Venue approach, you could orchestrate the new VM to be deployed to the cluster with the least number of VMs already provisioned on that cluster. That way you’ll be evenly distributing your computing load across your data center automatically.
For more details about this example, see Using Orchestration Actions to Determine the Best Execution Venue Environment.
At CloudBolt, we believe that administrators should be able to choose an environment based on any programmatically discoverable data point accessible to our hybrid cloud platform. For example, choosing an environment based on which datastore in VMware has the most available disk space, which network has more free IP addresses, which one is currently under the most CPU load, the group of the user, whether the user checks certain combinations of boxes on the order form, or any other criteria are all possible. CloudBolt can choose an environment based on any logic our customers specify—including combinations of performance, security, and cost criteria.
