The 9 AWS Certifications: Which is Right for You and Your Team?
As companies increasingly shift workloads to the public cloud, cloud computing has moved from a nice-to-have to a core competency in the enterprise...
Learn MoreIf you’re looking to the cloud for the solutions to all of mankind’s many problems, you’re in for a disappointment. Chewing gum will always lose its flavor after a while. So there’s that. But even the IT world has scenarios for which the cloud has nothing to offer: some applications need to live on-premise because of security, legacy hardware, or compliance issues. Since it’s getting harder to maintain entirely local deployments, many look to balance their on-premise resources with cloud connectivity. If your on-premise tools include a VMware stack, then some kind of AWS VMware solution could work for you.
In general, hybrid computing combines the resources of both public and on-premise infrastructure. Intelligently designed combinations can sometimes prove far more effective than single-host deployments.
Nothing is impossible. It’s all about understanding what’s available and implementing proper design. So here are three approaches you could take (besides my own thoughts on the topic from a few months ago):
AWS’s VM Import/Export makes it simple to convert VM images to EC2 instances and back again. Through the AWS CLI, individual server images or entire infrastructures can be moved between your data center and the AWS cloud. There’s no need to abandon either the configurations or the security of your deployments, and you’re definitely not locking yourself into any one platform choice.
If you’ve already been using VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform – and particularly their vCenter Server management tool – then the AWS Management Portal for vCenter will make your connections and conversions straightforward.
The Portal is a plugin that lets you migrate, create and manage VMware images alongside your AWS resources. The look-and-feel and the workflow that you use to create new AWS resources will be familiar. You can download the AWS Management Portal for vCenter and install it into your existing vSphere Client:
In hybrid cloud environments, you will always need connectivity between your on-premise VMware servers and AWS. As we’ve discussed, security – and especially the security of your data in transit – is a very important concern whenever you’re working with more than one location. You can greatly lower your risks through AWS Direct Connect. Direct Connect is a dedicated, high capacity, secure and private link that you can create between your site and an AWS location.
Direct Connect can add to your AWS VMware balance and help you reduce bandwidth costs, while providing consistent network performance and private connectivity.