{"id":11075,"date":"2021-04-15T11:43:17","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T18:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/?p=11075"},"modified":"2024-09-12T01:58:55","modified_gmt":"2024-09-12T08:58:55","slug":"hybrid-cloud-couchbase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/hybrid-cloud-couchbase\/","title":{"rendered":"Hybrid Cloud Services & Computing Models"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are Hybrid Cloud Services?<\/h2>\n

Everyone has heard the term \u201chybrid cloud,\u201d but what exactly are hybrid cloud services, and why are they becoming so important to enterprise architectures? And what’s the best way to take advantage of a hybrid cloud computing strategy? The key is leveraging technology that best supports the hybrid cloud infrastructure model, including choosing the right database.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201chybrid cloud\u201d concept refers to a virtual service that is able to isolate and move processing and storage between private cloud resources and public cloud resources to control costs and realize the best balance of security and privacy, and scale and resilience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hybrid cloud is, in essence, the merging of two models: running customer facing applications in the public cloud for scale, elasticity, and flexibility, and running mission-critical applications on-premises or in a private cloud for privacy, security, and control.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Use a Hybrid Cloud Strategy?<\/b><\/h2>\n

The main benefits of blending resources from the public and private clouds in a hybrid environment include gaining greater authority over your data and preserving more flexible options for using it. With a hybrid cloud approach, organizations can choose to host and process data where and when it\u2019s most appropriate to meet performance, security or regulatory requirements.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, many organizations will choose to securely host sensitive employee data in an on-prem data center. In contrast, hosting less sensitive applications in the public cloud — online consumer catalogs, for example — for elasticity and scale.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another benefit of the hybrid cloud model comes from the concept of creating an environment that spans multiple cloud service providers. For example, an organization might deploy a single database technology with clusters running in public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and then replicate data between them. The resulting hybrid cloud environment reduces dependencies on any one provider, enabling flexible disaster recovery and eliminating vendor lock-in.<\/span><\/p>\n

Additionally, the hybrid cloud model provides organizations greater precision in choosing a physical storage location. Pick the cloud provider and region that best suits your workload, isolating and hosting data locally for highest performance or to meet data sovereignty requirements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hybrid cloud solutions also bring greater flexibility in terms of elasticity, as organizations can expand and shrink computing power when they need to, based on their applications’ needs. Consider the accounting firm that turns on public cloud resources only during tax time. Hybrid cloud solutions scale seamlessly, drawing on outside resources only as needed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Efficiency + Privacy<\/b><\/h2>\n

More than ever, global organizations must ensure that their applications are secure and meet regulatory mandates such as GDPR. But in almost all cases, sensitive data is just a part of the overall data footprint – the rest of it may not be considered private. A hybrid cloud allows an organization to meet regulatory requirements by isolating sensitive data to private resources, and at the same time, take advantage of the computing capabilities of the public cloud, effectively combining the benefits of efficiency, scale, privacy and cost control.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hybrid Cloud Implications on Your Database Technology<\/b><\/h2>\n

Many organizations embarking on a hybrid cloud initiative face challenges in planning how to store and manage data. In many cases, they may deploy completely separate database instances based on sensitivity – some on private resources, some on public resources. Accordingly, the databases have no awareness of the other data repositories in the ecosystem.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While this architecture seemingly improves security, it hurts efficiency because the organization has to manage and maintain each repository separately, adding complexity. What’s needed is a single database technology that can span storage, processing, replication across on-premises environments and private and public cloud environments, and even across cloud service providers, allowing for the utmost flexibility and scale to handle current and future application needs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maximize the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Services With Couchbase<\/b><\/h2>\n

Couchbase is a geo-distributed cloud-native database that you can easily deploy and manage on-premises, in a private cloud, and across any public cloud provider, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. With Couchbase, you get native JSON support, SQL queries, aggregation, elastic scalability and a shared-nothing architecture, along with full support for Kubernetes containerization, meaning you can quickly deploy on any cloud infrastructure and manage automatically with Couchbase Autonomous Operator.<\/span><\/p>\n

The secret to Couchbase\u2019s support for a hybrid cloud architecture is its ability to connect with any other Couchbase cluster using cross datacenter replication (XDCR), a built-in feature that replicates and synchronizes data between clusters, irrespective of where they are deployed. XDCR provides the common link from which you can create a fabric of connected Couchbase clusters, which effectively provides:<\/span><\/p>\n