Hybrid Cloud - who okayed this?

We no longer live in a world where people debate if the cloud is right for them or not. Cloud has become a first class citizen. The word cloud is used in this articleto indicate a compute model and not necessarily a place. There are two cloud models available to choose from that is private and public. The combination of these two with orchestration in the midst gets you hybrid cloud. This is where IT depts in most organizations live today. Hybrid cloud being most organizations' default is theconsequence of the massive drive of IT infrastructure to the public cloud in the recent times. These organizations were left with some legacy applications or infrastructure on-premises. And, the commonsensical way to solve this problem is to bridge these two with orchestration and high-speed VPN. This is easier said than done. The reason for hybrid cloud being hard to build, manage and administer is that it is mostly found in a heterogeneous environment. A heterogeneous environment in the sense that the solution in public cloud and private cloud or virtualization solution are from different vendors and is not bound by any industry standards for interoperability. This is due to the timelines at which cloud-high hit fever pitch. The specific timeline being thatVMware was leading the virtualization space and AWS was leading the public cloud space. The way you architect and manage these environmentsis different from one another. The teams, skills, and mindset for these two platforms were mostlydifferent too. Microsoft was merely catching up on these two fronts during those days, and their sales teams could bask in the glory of being the only provider to have a public and private cloud story (although infrequently); SystemCenter for private and Azure for the public. This story is strengthening for Microsoft with the introduction of Azure Stack and puts them in an enviably unique position. The position that they need not have a fixed agenda, a customer could buy either a private cloud or a public cloud solution from Microsoft; unlike the case of AWS, VMwareor Google. Due to the variations in platform models that exist in your infrastructure, if you have a hybrid cloud you pretty much have chaos. Chaos in terms of what server is where, where is it ideal,who is responsible for it, what tools to use, what could bethe efficient placement of various services/components,auditing is hard with heterogeneous systems on heterogeneous platforms.If your organizationuses theancient martial art called ITIL; you might as well drop your braided hair down the high castle you're in for the mythical prince to save you. Below are some rough edges I see with organizations with a heterogeneous hybrid cloud People: One of the challenges in the market is finding individuals with the ability to have a fair grasp on networking, storage and compute so they can architect a top notch solution on any of the public cloud platforms. In other words, keep in mind of the 5000 pieces that make a solution/application work with a deep focus on each component from time to time. With a hybrid cloud, the complexity is significantly larger for the requirement of knowledge of various private and public cloud platforms and thus a significant reduction in the number of available candidates. Also, when you've fragmented technologies in your IT landscape you'll be slow to move forward, you'll end up with more meetings and processes gauging implications of changes you're making across teams, compliance and audits. Seamless interoperability: As mentioned earlier, when you've different vendors serving you on-premises and in public cloud, there is little to no higher level standards to guide on interoperability. The only relevant guiding standards that exist currently in this context is that of networking and security, but those do not give you advantages of a true hybrid cloud that you'd expect. Being able to move a virtual machine from on-premises to a public cloud for example. I do not mean this in the context of a migration, but like a cloud burst scenario. Vendors like Google and VMware are working on seamless interoperability, and hope they win at it. I'm not suggesting that there is no interoperability between various on-prem and public cloud platforms, it is just that it is not seamless enough. The seamlessness need not be due to a deliberate solution-architecture aimed at interoperability but as an inherent function of public and private cloud technology capability. Security: Consider any of the major private or public cloud platforms in use, they'll all have most of the standards required by regulations imposed by governments or relevant industries. It is to be fairly noted that this implies security for the platform as a whole and not necessarily for the solution you place on these platforms. This means as a consequence of protecting the vendor's platform you'll get some protection; like DDoS protection for example. But, security for your application should be customized for your scenario much like you'd have done in a traditional datacenter. The complexity with the hybrid cloud is that one needs to be aware of data protection mechanisms in various platforms and take special precautions from unintentionally building a weak link at the point of bridge between public and private cloud. So what? Have an aggressive public cloud plan, unless you're in some industry that's living under a rock or some legacy app vendor broke up with you. Whatever your counter story is, re-evaluate that. The efficiency of public cloud is unmatched in comparison to that of a private cloud. The reason cost is not in the previous list is because it is too obvious. Analysts or cloud management platform vendors who propagate a hybrid cloud nirvana story has vested interests in heterogeneous environments. If you're an organization with purchase/IT strategy decisions from the past to protect, and we all know how a startup in your industry inventing the future will run past the past you're protecting. Hire from outside or train internally for public cloud, whatever your plan. Have an aggressive roadmap for public cloud. I'll be glad to see your views below. Thanks!