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Virtualisation is increasingly becoming the default deployment mode for the provisioning of new enterprise workloads. At the same time, organisations are using hybrid virtualisation and cloud architectures to scale their applications across physical and virtual assets, and this is shifting the goal posts for Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and Application Delivery Networks (ADN).

This said, the challenges facing Virtual Infrastructure (VI) administrators wanting to safeguard the health of applications across private virtual machines (VMs) are dramatically amplified by hybrid cloud. This is particularly so when it comes to maintaining application high availability and optimised performance to deliver a user experience more readily associated with on-premise environments.

The virtual load balancer has been a critical component in the transition of client/server applications served from physical devices to those served from virtualised topologies. It now has an important role to play in managing application delivery in the hybrid cloud. Some of the main considerations for evaluating hybrid cloud application services should include:

• Keeping failover low touch and simple between the public and private parts of the hybrid cloud
• How to route clients to the best location when applications are active across hybrid cloud boundaries
• How to manage delivery of intelligent Layer 7 services as they move outside the data centre
• How to optimise the deployment of multi-tenant applications using shared resources

Making sure that new enterprise workloads running over hybrid cloud architecture can navigate the private/public journey without degradation of performance, promises a number of advantages. These include optimal performance when switching from virtualised on-premise to a hybrid cloud environment, even if network and user volume conditions burst unpredictably. In addition, persistent uptime ensures that failover and disaster recovery backup mechanisms are always on, while streamlined management spanning environments provides a single, global domain for authenticated user access.

Another advantage of hybrid cloud extensibility is that it creates a window for processing applications without risk to traffic flow congestion. So-called bursty cloud traffic can be offloaded by bringing up new VM instances in the public vector of the hybrid cloud before on-premise data centre capacity becomes exhausted.

QUESTION OF SECURITY
Legitimate issues have been raised with respect to cloud security, including how to protect data traversing between the private and public cloud. Protecting data at rest in a remote cloud infrastructure and enforcing governance and compliance standards across all environments is vitally important.

One security service that extends to the hybrid cloud is reverse proxy, which can be configured to handle requests from a group of remote or arbitrary clients to a group of known resources. Integrated security services like web application protection can act as reverse proxies in order to inspect application traffic for attacks.

BETTER MANAGEMENT
From a management standpoint, the benefits of adopting hybrid cloud load balancing include:

• Avoiding the need to change applications as they migrate to the public cloud to achieve similar on-premise service levels
• A more holistic solution, providing high availability as well as managing namespaces for accessing virtualised applications across cloud boundaries ensuring that failover steps are minimised
• Intelligent content switching and edge security enable admins to securely and reliably deliver multi-tenant applications to clients on a single set of hosted resources.

Because of its simple configuration and portability, the virtual load balancer integrates well into next generation hybrid cloud environments and a Layer 7 focus ensures that virtualised application instances perform as optimally as they should, not just in the context of being a VM, but for the specific application they are serving. Contrary to generally received wisdom, it appears that a well-balanced hybrid cloud is a real case of getting the best of both.