Hybrid cloud management solution based on Rainbond

Summary of content: The article discusses the difficulties and key points in the hybrid cloud scenario, as well as the solution of the Rainbond platform in cross-cloud platform hybrid cloud management. Including orchestrating and managing containers in multiple clusters through a unified console to achieve consistent management of applications in hybrid clouds. The article also introduces the application template delivery and cross-cloud team management functions of the Rainbond platform in a hybrid cloud environment, helping users simplify application delivery and O&M operations across cloud platforms.

Application Scenarios of Hybrid Cloud

With the gradual maturity of cloud-native technology, hybrid cloud has become one of the hot topics in the field of cloud-native enterprises. The hybrid cloud scenario is characterized by the deployment and operation of enterprise applications and data in multiple cloud environments, including private clouds and public clouds, as well as different cloud service providers. Such a scenario presents many challenges and opportunities.

The value points of hybrid cloud mainly lie in:

• Flexibility and scalability: Hybrid cloud allows enterprises to choose the most suitable deployment solution in different cloud environments, making the deployment of applications and services more flexible and scalable.

• High availability and disaster recovery capabilities: Hybrid cloud can improve system availability and disaster recovery capabilities by deploying applications and data in multiple cloud environments, thereby reducing system downtime and data loss.

• Reduce costs: Hybrid cloud allows enterprises to choose the most favorable price and performance ratio in different cloud environments according to application and data requirements, thereby reducing overall costs.

Hybrid cloud management essentials

Hybrid cloud scenarios are much more complicated than single private cloud or public cloud scenarios. The difficulty of building a hybrid cloud often comes from the many differences between cloud platforms provided by different providers, making it difficult to achieve a unified management experience. Moreover, cloud platforms provided by multiple suppliers do not communicate with each other. When synchronizing data across clouds, consistency and security need to be considered.

• Standardization across cloud platforms: There are various differences between different cloud platforms, which complicates the operation and management of cross-cloud platforms. Standardization can make the operation and management between different platforms more consistent and reduce management difficulty.

• Data consistency: Data exchange and synchronization between different cloud platforms need to ensure data consistency to avoid data conflicts and loss.

• Security: In a hybrid cloud scenario, data and applications between different cloud platforms need to be properly protected to ensure data confidentiality and integrity.

• User management: In a hybrid cloud scenario, the user systems of different cloud platforms are not the same. A unified hybrid cloud management platform can use a set of user systems to manage computing resources in multiple clusters, greatly reducing management costs.

Functional Requirements for Hybrid Cloud Scenarios

In a hybrid cloud scenario, the following cross-cloud functions are often in strong demand:

1. Consistent operation experience: With a consistent management experience, smooth out the operational differences between users using different cloud resources. It enables users to complete the core process of applications from publishing to launching to multiple cloud environments through a set of operations. Consistent operating experience can greatly reduce the user's discomfort in the face of multiple different cloud environments, making the underlying computing resources transparent to users.

2. User management: By abstracting the user system at the unified console level, a set of users can manage all clusters. It can greatly reduce the cost of enterprise management.

3. Cross-cloud migration and deployment: As enterprises deploy applications on multiple cloud platforms, cross-cloud migration and deployment becomes very important. Being able to migrate applications from one cloud platform to another, seamlessly deploy and manage them in a multi-cloud environment will greatly increase the flexibility and agility of the enterprise.

4. Multi-cloud disaster recovery: Since cloud service providers may encounter availability issues, multi-cloud disaster recovery becomes very important in hybrid cloud scenarios. By deploying applications on multiple cloud platforms, enterprises can quickly switch to run on another cloud platform to maintain business continuity when a cloud platform encounters a problem.

5. Cross-cloud data management: In hybrid cloud scenarios, cross-cloud data management is also an important requirement. Being able to backup and restore data on multiple cloud platforms, as well as share data between different cloud platforms, will provide enterprises with greater flexibility and scalability.

Hybrid cloud construction based on Rainbond

The Rainbond cloud-native application management platform has considered how to adapt to hybrid cloud management scenarios at the beginning of its design. In product design, Rainbond can be logically divided into console and cluster-side components. The multi-cloud management module of the console can connect and manage multiple clusters. The cluster-side components can be deployed in various Kubernetes clusters, and manage various resources in the Kubernetes cluster through communication with Kube-apiserver. Rainbond cluster-side components can be deployed in various Kubernetes clusters, including standard Kubernetes clusters and K3s clusters, and can also be deployed in managed clusters such as Alibaba Cloud ACK hosting service and Tencent Cloud TKE service. And it can adapt to various cloud services provided by public cloud service providers, such as allocating Alibaba cloud hard disk storage for business pods through CSI.

The Rainbond console provides the only entrance for multi-cluster management, and users can master the operation steps of publishing applications for different cloud environments without much learning. These operation steps are unified and easy to use, and are not constrained by different cloud environments at the lower level.

Team Workspace Isolation

The Rainbond cloud-native application management platform builds a user system at the console layer, which means that the user system has nothing to do with the low-level cloud environment. Rainbond uses its own RBAC authority system to determine which resources in the workspace corresponding to which cloud environments users can access. Rainbond divides the user's workspace through the abstract concept of team. The corresponding relationship between the team and the low-level cloud environment can be shared or exclusive. Once a user joins a designated team, they can use the cluster opened by the team.

• Shared mode: That is, a team activates in multiple different clusters. Once the team activates in multiple clusters, a namespace with the same name will be created in them at the same time. Users in this team can naturally deploy their own business systems in different clusters. The operation entrances of different clusters are provided by the console, which is very easy to understand.
• Exclusive mode: The exclusive mode is better understood, that is, the corresponding namespace is opened in the specified cluster, and the user can only use the computing resources in this cluster.

Based on the abstraction of the team workspace, users can complete application release and management operations in it. Rainbond provides more capabilities to enrich its management capabilities, including operation auditing, resource limits, and authority management.

Multi-cloud disaster recovery

Hybrid cloud multi-cloud disaster recovery is a strategy adopted to ensure high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of applications in hybrid cloud scenarios. In a hybrid cloud environment, since applications may be deployed on different cloud platforms, it is necessary to ensure that even if one cloud platform fails or is unavailable, the application can continue to run on other cloud platforms. This requires the realization of hybrid cloud multi-cloud disaster recovery, so that applications can be seamlessly switched between different cloud platforms to ensure high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of applications.

Rainbond's multi-cloud management mechanism has created a solid low-level framework for multi-cloud disaster recovery. Even though Rainbond has invested a lot in its own high availability capabilities, we still cannot assume that cluster-level downtime and crashes will not happen. In the production environment, other capabilities provided by cloud service providers are often used to build a robust multi-cloud disaster recovery scenario. Additional competencies to be cited include:

• Intelligent network entrance switching capability: Rainbond relies on the cooperation of CDN and intelligent DNS to complete the intelligent switching ability of network entrance. In normal times, external traffic can be automatically switched to the nearest gateway for access according to the region. When a cluster-level downtime occurs, the faulty cluster entry is taken offline.
• Data synchronization capability: no matter which cluster the user accesses, they will get the same feedback. The prerequisite for ensuring this effect is the real-time synchronization of business data in multiple clusters. Rainbond does not provide data synchronization capabilities, and we need to rely on data synchronization services provided by public cloud providers for this part. The DTS service provided by Alibaba Cloud is one of the representatives.
• Dedicated network capability: Data synchronization between multiple clusters often does not easily shuttle from the public network. From the perspective of security and reliability, we prefer to use private network for communication between multiple clusters, especially in the scenario of data synchronization across clouds.

Considering multi-cloud disaster recovery from the overall architecture is our top priority. But in the face of data disasters, what we can do is not only to take precautions, but how to recover after the disaster is also a very important part. The Rainbond cloud-native management platform provides two levels of backup and recovery capabilities. The first is to back up the Rainbond platform itself to ensure that the platform itself can be restored; the second is the backup capability for applications, which can perform overall backups of applications including persistent data . The computer room can be destroyed by war, fire or natural disasters, but as long as the operation and maintenance personnel have backup data, the entire Rainbond hybrid cloud platform and the applications running on it can be rebuilt.

Cross-cloud application deployment

In hybrid cloud scenarios, business applications are first-class citizens, and how applications can be freely deployed in different cloud environments is actually the most basic requirement for hybrid cloud management scenarios. In this regard, the Rainbond cloud-native application management platform uses the application template delivery process to break through the barrier of application cross-cloud deployment.

Application delivery has always been a pain point that Rainbond is committed to solving. Modern microservices will often split the business system into dozens of interrelated microservices. Deploying them in the Kubernetes container cloud environment using traditional methods will inevitably cause headaches for dozens of complex Yaml files and container images. In addition, the cloud environments provided by different cloud providers are also different, which makes the experience of application delivery even more catastrophic.

As mentioned above, the Rainbond cloud-native application management platform has smoothed out the experience of using different cloud environments in the hybrid cloud scenario. The same is true in the application cross-cloud delivery scenario. The complex microservice system is abstracted into an application that can be managed and delivered in a unified manner in Rainbond. By publishing the application as an application template, one-click installation and upgrade can be completed between different clusters. Greatly reduces software delivery costs.

write at the end

The hybrid cloud management scenario is the hottest topic in the field of cloud computing at the moment, and the hybrid cloud created by using the Rainbond cloud-native application management platform can solve most of the difficulties and pain points. Looking forward to the future, Rainbond will continue to make efforts in the field of hybrid cloud management, and manage more different cloud resources around more complex scenarios. For example, through the integration with Kubedge, the hybrid cloud solution is extended to edge computing scenarios.

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