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Operational considerations
Hybrid cloud deployments present complex operational challenges. Differences between provider clouds can cause incompatibilities with workloads or Cloud Management Platforms (CMP). Cloud providers may also offer different levels of integration with competing cloud offerings.
Monitoring is critical to maintaining a hybrid cloud, and it is important to determine if a CMP supports monitoring of all the clouds involved, or if compatible APIs are available to be queried for necessary information.
Agility
Hybrid clouds provide application availability across different cloud environments and technologies. This availability enables the deployment to survive disaster in any single cloud environment. Each cloud should provide the means to create instances quickly in response to capacity issues or failure elsewhere in the hybrid cloud.
Application readiness
Enterprise workloads that depend on the underlying infrastructure for availability are not designed to run on OpenStack. If the application cannot tolerate infrastructure failures, it is likely to require significant operator intervention to recover. Applications for hybrid clouds must be fault tolerant, with an SLA that is not tied to the underlying infrastructure. Ideally, cloud applications should be able to recover when entire racks and data centers experience an outage.
Upgrades
If a deployment includes a public cloud, predicting upgrades may not be possible. Carefully examine provider SLAs.
Note
At massive scale, even when dealing with a cloud that offers an SLA with a high percentage of uptime, workloads must be able to recover quickly.
When upgrading private cloud deployments, minimize disruption by making incremental changes and providing a facility to either rollback or continue to roll forward when using a continuous delivery model.
You may need to coordinate CMP upgrades with hybrid cloud upgrades if there are API changes.
Network Operation Center
Consider infrastructure control when planning the Network Operation Center (NOC) for a hybrid cloud environment. If a significant portion of the cloud is on externally managed systems, prepare for situations where it may not be possible to make changes. Additionally, providers may differ on how infrastructure must be managed and exposed. This can lead to delays in root cause analysis where each insists the blame lies with the other provider.
Ensure that the network structure connects all clouds to form integrated system, keeping in mind the state of handoffs. These handoffs must both be as reliable as possible and include as little latency as possible to ensure the best performance of the overall system.
Maintainability
Hybrid clouds rely on third party systems and processes. As a result, it is not possible to guarantee proper maintenance of the overall system. Instead, be prepared to abandon workloads and recreate them in an improved state.