Hybrid IT Infrastructure Design Considerations Guide
It’s been months in the making, but it’s finally here – the Hybrid IT Infrastructure Design Considerations Guide. This guide is a document that you can use to prepare for your integration with a public cloud infrastructure services provider, like Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. This guide assumes that in the future, hybrid IT will be the norm for most organizations.
Your hybrid IT solution might be a hybrid cloud setup, where you have a private cloud on premises, or it might not be a hybrid cloud, where there is no on premises cloud and you have a traditional IT infrastructure on premises instead. The key thing is that you want to integrate your on premises infrastructure with that of a public cloud infrastructure service provider in order to create a hybrid IT infrastructure on which you can run your hybrid applications.
As I’ve mentioned many times on the blog in the past, I’ve always believed that “cloud” provides us the opportunity to start over, to get a “mulligan” on our datacenter. For many of us, our datacenters have grown in unpredictable ways and created an emergent design that isn’t what we would have if we had the one we really wanted. There are a lot of reasons for this, such as changes in technology and industry practices – and sometimes its just that you inherited something that was too hard to fix. Cloud gives you a chance to create a design and implementation that you’ll be proud of.
However, in order to get to that cloud nirvana, you’ll want to know all the things you need to consider as you begin your journey toward hybrid IT. I understand that there is a tremendous desire to hit the “create cloud” button in Virtual Machine Manager or the “Create VM” button in Azure Infrastructure Services. I know, because those are the first things I do too! And that’s a great approach when you’re kicking the tires on these great applications and services. But when you decide that testing is over, and it’s time for deployment, then you want to get all your ducks in a row and make sure that you deploy into a well-architected hybrid IT infrastructure.
That’s where the Hybrid IT Infrastructure Design Considerations Guide will help you. This guide contains a large number of questions you should answer to establish the requirements for your hybrid IT infrastructure. The questions are based on key infrastructure-related problem domains that are outlined in the Cloud Services Foundation Reference Model.
After understanding the key issues and questions you need to ask and answer, you’ll be able to come up with a design for your hybrid IT infrastructure that will meet your requirements and at the same time, reduce the number of surprises that would come from not being comprehensive about the design that will drive your implementation.
The guide weighs in at about 90 pages and is intended for the enterprise architect and designer. However, business decision makers and IT implementers will also find it interesting if they want to understand the core issues that need to be considered when designing an effective hybrid IT infrastructure that melds on premises resources with those hosted in a public cloud service provider’s network. While this is an architectural document, portions of it are vendor agnostic, and portions of it illustrate how Windows Azure Infrastructure Services can be used to enable the key capabilities and requirements for a well-architected hybrid IT design.
Let us know what you think! If you have suggestions for issues that weren’t included in the document, feel free to send an email to the address listed in the document. That email will be sent to all members of the DDEC Solutions Team, which is responsible for maintaining the document on the TechNet Wiki.
HTH,
Tom
Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Principal Knowledge Engineer, SCD iX Solutions Group
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