Your submission was sent successfully! Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Canonical
on 2 January 2023


Public clouds enabled digital transformation at unprecedented speed. But their operational costs over time can be exacting as compute needs increase. Hybrid clouds emerged as an alternative to gain the benefits of both worlds: private infrastructure that allows for lower operational expenditures and tighter control, and public clouds that can scale with ease.

Organisations looking to adopt a hybrid cloud architecture should carefully consider their options for private cloud vendors, as well as their implications for application design and development, workload orchestration and long-term maintenance.

Read the Hybrid cloud strategy: a modernisation playbook for CTOs

The journey to hybrid clouds

In the past, organisations used to maintain dedicated servers for individual services and operate infrastructure in conjunction with applications. These monolithic applications were relatively straightforward to develop at the outset but resulted in inefficient long-term resource utilisation and unnecessary operations overhead. Teams didn’t have the virtualisation and orchestration technologies they have today. So they spent hours upon hours maintaining dependencies between underlying operating systems and applications. If one part of the app experienced an increase in demand, everything had to be scaled up, sometimes even costly dedicated servers.

The main promise of the cloud was to provide lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to legacy IT infrastructure. No longer would you need to invest in hardware. You could rely on public clouds, like the trailblazers at Amazon Web Services (AWS), to do that. But the cloud also offered something grander: on- demand resources for improved development agility. To fully reap these benefits, organisations embarked on a modernisation journey. They sought approaches to remake applications in a cloud-native way.

Instead of building applications and running them as a monolith, they split them into smaller components (microservices) that could be deployed, updated and operated independently. Just when a brave new world for computing seemed to be in order, organisations started facing new challenges. Each service had to run in a separate virtual machine (VM) or a container, leading to increasing cloud workloads and rising resource consumption.

Alongside this, something else was brewing: the amount of data organisations collect, store and analyse started to explode. What ensued was increased demand for resources to host applications and incremental spendings on public clouds. Data proliferation also paved the way for new regulatory regimes. Suddenly, public clouds were not always more economical, nor the best option to retain control over data and meet compliance and sovereignty requirements.

As a result, many organisations started exploring private cloud solutions. They realised that they could also build clouds on-prem, which offered a balance. After all, owning is more profitable than renting, especially long-term and at scale. Well-designed private clouds can also provide more architectural freedom. They usually provide better performance too, given that there is no resource sharing. Moreover, having control over underlying infrastructure enables organisations to meet compliance regulations.

Where private clouds fall short is the high CapEx cost. Leading private cloud providers, like VMware, require expensive licences to be purchased upfront, before the private cloud can even materialise. Private clouds also entail higher operational overhead. Lack of scalability, given extensive procurement processes, can also make them inadequate for some use cases.

That is why hybrid clouds emerged as a welcome alternative.

Read the Hybrid cloud strategy: a modernisation playbook for CTOs

Related posts


Tytus Kurek
8 September 2023

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source

Cloud and server Article

Telco cloud implementation with Canonical and HPE Service providers need cloud infrastructure everywhere, from modern 5G and 6G network functions running in the network core to sophisticated AI/ML jobs running on the edge. Given the sensitivity of those workloads to any interruptions, outages or performance degradations, the cloud infrast ...


Hugo Huang
29 November 2023

Generative AI explained

AI Article

When OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, no one could have anticipated that the following 6 months would usher in a dizzying transformation for human society with the arrival of a new generation of artificial intelligence. Since the emergence of deep learning in the early 2010s, artificial intelligence has entered its third wave ...


Andreea Munteanu
24 November 2023

Building a comprehensive toolkit for machine learning

AI Article

In the last couple of years, the AI landscape has evolved from a researched-focused practice to a discipline delivering production-grade projects that are transforming operations across industries. Enterprises are growing their AI budgets, and are open to investing both in infrastructure and talent to accelerate their initiatives – so it’ ...