Kubernetes for Hybrid Cloud: 5 Challenges and How to Overcome Them

What Is a Hybrid Cloud? 

A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services, working together in a coordinated fashion. This approach enables businesses to create a flexible IT infrastructure that can dynamically adjust to varying workloads and requirements. 

The hybrid cloud model allows for data and applications to be shared between private and public clouds, providing businesses with greater flexibility and more deployment options. By enabling movement of workloads between private and public environments as computing needs and costs change, a hybrid cloud gives organizations the ability to balance privacy, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.

A successful hybrid cloud strategy can offer seamless interoperability and data portability among the different environments. This means that applications can be developed and tested in one environment, such as a public cloud, and deployed in another, like a private cloud or on-premises data center, without significant modification. 

This is part of a series of articles about Kubernetes management.

How Kubernetes Enables Hybrid Clouds 

Kubernetes, an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers, is a useful tool for enabling the hybrid cloud model. Let’s look at its main capabilities and how they support hybrid clouds.

Portability

Kubernetes allows businesses to run their applications seamlessly across different environments—be it on-premises, in private clouds, or in public clouds. Kubernetes achieves this by abstracting the underlying infrastructure, enabling applications to be deployed in containers that can run anywhere Kubernetes is supported. 

The uniformity of the Kubernetes platform means that developers can build and test applications in one environment (like a public cloud, for its scalability and cost-effectiveness) and deploy them in another (such as a private cloud or on-premises, for enhanced security or compliance) without needing to refactor the application’s code or configuration.

Scalability

Kubernetes enhances the scalability of applications within a hybrid cloud environment by allowing for easy deployment and scaling of containers based on demand. It employs automated scaling, self-healing, and load balancing features, making it simpler for organizations to manage the performance and availability of their applications across different clouds.

Kubernetes’ ability to automatically scale applications up or down based on usage, and dynamically manage computing resources, allows organizations to achieve cloud native capabilities, even in their private data center.

Fault Tolerance

Kubernetes distributes containers across multiple hosts, ensuring that applications remain available even if one or more hosts fail. Kubernetes automatically manages the placement of containers to optimize for fault tolerance, and its self-healing capabilities automatically restart failed containers, replace them, and reschedule them to other hosts, minimizing downtime.

The design of Kubernetes allows it to integrate with storage, networking, and other cloud-native services, allowing applications to maintain high availability and resilience across hybrid environments. 

Tips from the expert

Itiel Shwartz

Co-Founder & CTO

Itiel is the CTO and co-founder of Komodor. He’s a big believer in dev empowerment and moving fast, has worked at eBay, Forter and Rookout (as the founding engineer). Itiel is a backend and infra developer turned “DevOps”, an avid public speaker that loves talking about things such as cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Python, observability, and R&D culture.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you better manage Kubernetes in a hybrid cloud environment:

Employ unified monitoring tools

Utilize tools that offer centralized monitoring across on-premises and cloud environments for comprehensive visibility.

Use service meshes for networking

Implement service meshes like Istio to simplify and secure inter-service communication across hybrid cloud environments.

Adopt centralized IAM solutions

Leverage centralized IAM solutions that support multi-cloud environments to ensure consistent access management.

Implement hybrid storage solutions

Use hybrid storage solutions that provide seamless data access and management across on-premises and cloud environments.

Enforce consistent CI/CD practices

Standardize CI/CD pipelines to ensure consistent deployment and management of applications across all environments.

Managing a Hybrid Cloud in Kubernetes 

Let’s look at some of the strategies involved in managing hybrid deployments in Kubernetes.

Use a Unified Dashboard Across Environments

Unified dashboards offer a single view of clusters and workloads across all environments. They provide centralized monitoring, logging, and management capabilities, enabling IT teams to oversee their entire infrastructure from one place. This helps in quickly identifying and addressing issues, optimizing resources, and enforcing policies across different environments.

Open source tools like Kubernetes Dashboard and Grafana can provide a partial solution, but organizations should consider dedicated Kubernetes monitoring and visualization solutions, which provide a single pane of glass for managing resource utilization, costs, and operational issues across multiple Kubernetes clusters. 

It is important to integrate Kubernetes dashboarding solutions with monitoring and management tools, to ensure that teams have comprehensive visibility into the health, performance, and security of applications.

Learn more about Komodor for Kubernetes management, monitoring and visualization

Apply Consistent Configurations and Policies to Multiple Clusters

Distributed configuration and policy management tools allow teams to define configurations and policies once and apply them across all clusters, regardless of their location. This approach simplifies management, reduces the risk of configuration drift, and enforces security and compliance standards uniformly.

GitOps practices, where infrastructure and application configurations are stored in version-controlled repositories, and Kubernetes-native solutions like Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for policy enforcement, can automate and standardize the distribution of configurations and policies. This ensures that clusters are consistently configured and compliant with organizational standards.

Enable Portability of Clusters Between On-Prem and Cloud Infrastructure

Automating the deployment process ensures that clusters are set up quickly, correctly, and in a repeatable manner across different environments. This uniformity is crucial for operational efficiency and simplifies the management of multi-environment Kubernetes infrastructures.

Using infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or cloud-specific services such as AWS CloudFormation or Azure Resource Manager, can help automate the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters. These tools allow for the definition of infrastructure through code, which can be versioned and reused to improve consistency and stability.

Standardize Scaling and Upgrading Across Clusters

Automated scaling and upgrading mechanisms enable clusters to adjust resources based on demand and stay up-to-date with the latest features and security patches. Standardizing these processes across on-premises and cloud environments helps to minimize manual intervention, reduce errors, and ensure that all clusters meet organizational standards.

Leveraging Kubernetes’ built-in auto-scaling capabilities, such as Cluster Autoscaler, and adopting automated upgrade strategies using tools like kubeadm or cloud provider-managed Kubernetes services, can streamline these processes. By defining standard operating procedures for scaling and upgrading, organizations can ensure that their Kubernetes clusters remain efficient and secure.

5 Key Challenges for Kubernetes Hybrid Clouds and How to Overcome Them 

Kubernetes is uniquely suited to hybrid cloud environments, but still presents challenges. Let’s look at some of the main obstacles to maintaining a Kubernetes hybrid cloud environment and how to overcome them.

1. Infrastructure Configuration Across Environments

In a hybrid cloud, each environment, whether on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud, has its unique characteristics, configurations, and requirements. Ensuring consistent configuration across these varied environments is complex and requires a deep understanding of both Kubernetes and the underlying infrastructure. This complexity can lead to configuration drift, where differences between environments cause inconsistencies in behavior or performance.

To mitigate these challenges, organizations must invest in automation and tools that can help manage and synchronize configurations across environments. Implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices can also provide templated configurations that are reusable and easily applied to different environments, helping to ensure consistency and reduce manual errors.

2. Cluster Networking and Ingress

Networking in a Kubernetes hybrid cloud environment can become complicated due to the need to connect services and workloads across different cloud providers and on-premises data centers. Managing ingress traffic to Kubernetes clusters, ensuring secure and efficient routing of external traffic to the appropriate services, and maintaining consistent network policies across environments are challenging tasks.

To address these issues, organizations often leverage service meshes, such as Istio or Linkerd, or employ Kubernetes networking solutions like Calico or Cilium, which abstract away the complexity of underlying network configurations. These tools can provide a consistent layer for managing service discovery, traffic management, and security policies across hybrid cloud environments.

Learn more in our detailed guide to cluster autoscaler 

3. Identity and Access Management Integration

Organizations typically have existing identity and access management (IAM) systems that they use for on-premises and cloud resources. However, extending these systems to manage access to Kubernetes clusters and resources across multiple environments can be complex, requiring synchronization of policies, users, and credentials.

Leveraging centralized IAM solutions that support multi-cloud and on-premises environments can help. These solutions should integrate seamlessly with Kubernetes, enabling single sign-on (SSO) and consistent policy enforcement. Adopting role-based access control (RBAC) in Kubernetes helps define granular access rights for different users and services.

4. Storage and Data Gravity Concerns

Data gravity is the idea that data and services are attracted to each other, complicating their separation. Data-intensive applications may face performance and compliance issues when data must be moved or accessed across different environments. Ensuring persistent and consistent storage that meets performance, scalability, and regulatory requirements is complex.

Organizations can implement data management strategies that optimize for locality and performance, such as data federation or hybrid storage solutions that seamlessly bridge cloud and on-premises storage. Kubernetes’ persistent volume framework can also help manage storage abstractly, providing applications with the storage resources they need.

5. Disjointed Operational Procedures

Maintaining consistent operational procedures across hybrid cloud environments can be difficult due to differences in tools, processes, and standards between cloud providers and on-premises systems. This disjointedness can lead to inefficiencies, increased risk of errors, and challenges in enforcing security and compliance policies. 

Adopting cloud-agnostic tools and platforms that provide a unified interface for managing Kubernetes clusters across different environments can help streamline operations. Implementing DevOps practices and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines designed for a hybrid cloud context ensure that applications are deployed and managed consistently.

Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes Management & Troubleshooting With Komodor

Kubernetes troubleshooting is complex and involves multiple components; you might experience errors that are difficult to diagnose and fix. Without the right tools and expertise in place, the troubleshooting process can become stressful, ineffective and time-consuming. Some best practices can help minimize the chances of things breaking down, but eventually something will go wrong – simply because it can – especially across hybrid cloud environments.

This is where Komodor comes in – Komodor is the Continuous Kubernetes Reliability Platform, designed to democratize K8s expertise across the organization and enable engineering teams to leverage its full value.

Komodor’s platform empowers developers to confidently monitor and troubleshoot their workloads while allowing cluster operators to enforce standardization and optimize performance. Specifically when working in a hybrid environment, Komodor reduces the complexity by providing a unified view of all your services and clusters.

By leveraging Komodor, companies of all sizes significantly improve reliability, productivity, and velocity. Or, to put it simply – Komodor helps you spend less time and resources on managing Kubernetes, and more time on innovating at scale.

If you are interested in checking out Komodor, use this link to sign up for a Free Trial.