OSDC 2016 - Hybrid Cloud

The Open Source Data Center Conference 2016 is a good measure for how the industry changes. Compared to 2014 Cloud topics take more and more space. Both how to build your own on-premise cloud with Mesos, CoreOS or Kubernetes but also how to use the public Cloud.

Maybe not surprising, I used the conference to present my own findings from 2 years of Cloud migration at ImmobilienScout24:


After we first tried to find  way to quickly migrate our data centers into the Cloud we now see that a hybrid approach works better. Data center and cloud are both valued platforms and we will optimize the costs between them.

Hybrid Cloud - A Cloud Migration Strategy

Do you use Cloud? Why? What about the 15 year legacy of your data center? How many Enterprise vendors tried to sell you their "Hybrid Cloud" solution? What actually is a Hybrid Cloud?

Cloud computing is not just a new way of running servers or Docker containers. The interesting part of any Cloud offering are managed services that provide solutions to difficult problems. Prime examples are messaging (SNS/SQS), distributed storage (S3), managed databases (RDS) and especially turn-key solutions like managed Hadoop (EMR).

Hybrid Cloud is usually understood as a way to unify or standardize server hosting across private data centers and Public Cloud vendors. Some Hybrid Cloud solutions even go as far as providing a unified API that abstracts away all the differences between different platforms. Unfortunately that approach focuses on the lowest common denominator and effectively prevents using the advanced services that each Cloud vendor also offers. However, these service are the true value of Public Cloud vendors.

Another approach to integrating Public Cloud and private data centers is using services from both worlds depending on the problems to solve. Don't hide the cloud technologies but make it simple to use them - both from within the data center and the cloud instances. Create a bridge between the old world of the data center and the new world of the Public Cloud. A good bridge will motivate your developers to move the company to the cloud.

Based upon recent developments at ImmobilienScout24, this talk tries to suggest a sustainable Cloud migration strategy from private data centers through a Hybrid Cloud into the AWS Cloud.
  • Bridging the security model of the data center with the security model of AWS.
  • Integrating the AWS identity management (IAM) with the existing servers in the data center.
  • Secure communication between services running in the data center and in AWS.
  • Deploying data center servers and Cloud resources together.
  • Service discovery for services running both in the data center and AWS.
Most of the tools used are Open Source and this talk will show how they come together to support this strategy:

As soon as the video is published I will update the talk here.

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