Hybrid Cloud with AWS | AWS Whitepaper Summary

In this whitepaper summary (originally published at November 2020), we will navigate through various offerings from AWS for hybrid technical and organizational adoption of cloud services. AWS is a pioneer in this field, as it understands the need to integrate cloud, on-premises and edge infrastructure of existing and potential customers.

In addition, and with respect to the huge effort the contributors of this whitepaper did, we will try to update the information and figures that represent the current offerings. Finally, the inspiring use case of Dropbox adoption of AWS hybrid cloud will be presented.

Considerations of Hybrid Cloud with AWS

Create a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Ongoing migration to the cloud.
Ensuring business continuity during disaster.
Expanding on-premises cloud infrastructure to support low-latency apps.
Expanding international footprint with AWS.

Create a Technical Strategy

Identify the guiding tenets for hybrid cloud architecture.
Define guiding principles for a planned hybrid cloud implementation.

Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

Application Migration to the Cloud

VMware cloud with AWS delivers a faster, easier, and cost-effective path to the hybrid cloud while allowing customers to modernize applications enabling faster time-to-market and increased innovation, especially with the new Amazon EC2 i3en.metal instances powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.

Cloud Services On-premises

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Data Center Extension

Cloud Bursting, with offerings of bursting for compute resource through Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate, or bursting for storage through Amazon S3 APIs and AWS Storage Gateway for block and file storage.
Backup and Disaster Recovery, with offerings such as Amazon S3 APIs, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS DataSync and AWS Transfer for SFTP.
Distributed Data Processing, where low-latency or local data reside on-premises, while asynchronous processing, archiving, compliance, business analytics processing and machine learning-based predictions reside on AWS. AWS offerings for those purposes include AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Backup, AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) for data importing, and leverage AWS Analytics, AWS Machine Learning, AWS Serverless, AWS Containers for data processing.
Geographic Expansion, where customers take benefit of AWS Outposts in countries where AWS regions do not exist, and AWS Global Infrastructure in countries covered by AWS regions.

Edge Computing

AWS Snowball, AWS Snowcone and AWS Snowmobile.
AWS IoT Greengrass, which is an open-source edge runtime and cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software.
AWS Wavelength for mobile edge computing applications.

ISV and Software Compatibility

AWS has built the most complete and proven approach for rapidly migrating tens to thousands of applications to the AWS Cloud to help you leverage your existing on-premises ISV software investments. Find out more at AWS Marketplace.