Top 7 Best Practices For Hybrid Cloud Automation in 2024
Implementing automation across hybrid cloud environments has become a strategic priority for many enterprises today. Research shows that hybrid cloud adoption is accelerating, with over 90% of organizations already having a hybrid infrastructure in place[1].
However, effectively managing and optimizing hybrid cloud operations remains challenging without the right approach. This article outlines seven key best practices to follow when implementing hybrid cloud automation.
The top 7 best practices covered are:
- Take an application-centric approach
- Standardize and automate processes
- Implement infrastructure-as-code
- Adopt a DevOps culture
- Use containers and microservices
- Monitor and optimize performance
- Maintain strong security across environments
Adopting these recommendations can help you maximize the return on your automation investment and avoid common pitfalls. Let‘s explore each of these best practices in more detail.
The Rise of Hybrid Cloud
Before diving into the key recommendations, it‘s helpful to understand what‘s driving hybrid cloud adoption and the associated challenges:
- By 2025, over 95% of enterprises will have a hybrid cloud strategy in place – Flexera‘s 2022 State of the Cloud Report found that 93% of enterprises already have a hybrid model today, underscoring how dominant this approach has become[1].
- Top drivers include flexibility, data sovereignty, and legacy system integration – Hybrid cloud allows organizations to maintain control of sensitive data on-premise while leveraging the scalability of public cloud. It also enables legacy systems to be integrated with and augmented by cloud capabilities.
- Managing complexity is the top challenge – In a survey by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 75% of respondents cited complexity as their top hybrid cloud challenge. Lack of visibility across environments and siloed teams/processes also pose major obstacles[2].
This data highlights the urgent need for strategies like automation to tame the complexity of hybrid cloud management. So what specific steps should you take? Let‘s dive into the top 7 best practices.
Best Practice #1: Take an Application-Centric Approach
Many organizations first explore hybrid cloud automation through the lens of infrastructure management. But the most effective approach is to focus automation around delivering better application outcomes.
Automation should enhance application performance, availability, and the overall experience – not just infrastructure configurations.
“Application teams don’t care about virtual machines or network configurations, they care about the performance and reliability of their apps,” says Mike Kavis, VP at Cloud Technology Partners. “Automation has to align with how they work."
This means automating your application deployment pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, and app scaling based on real user traffic and performance metrics. A workload automation platform can orchestrate these processes end-to-end.
Key recommendations:
- Work backwards from application SLAs/KPIs – Let the metrics that matter most to the business drive your automation strategy.
- Standardize application architectures and pipelines – This accelerates deployment and makes automation easier.
- Automate infrastructure provisioning – Automatically scale up/down resources to maintain application SLAs.
- Leverage AIOps – Harness AI algorithms to tune infrastructure based on application performance.
Results from an application-first focus:
- Up to 70% faster app deployment [3]
- Up to 80% less unplanned downtime [3]
- Up to 5x more app issues resolved automatically [4]
Best Practice #2: Standardize and Automate Processes
Hybrid cloud environments easily become filled with disparate tools, scripts, and custom solutions. This complexity makes automation very difficult.
As Mike Kavis warns: "You can’t automate a mess. First simplify and standardize your processes before automating them.”
Manually managing workflows across hybrid infrastructure is error-prone. Standardizing your provisioning, deployment, maintenance, and data integration processes is crucial.
Here are a few recommendations on how to standardize:
- Document – Visually map out your current workflows and procedures first. Look for areas to consolidate disparate processes and tools.
- Use configuration management databases (CMDBs) – CMDBs provide a central repository of all IT components and configurations so you can standardize.
- Implement ITSM – IT Service Management frameworks like ITIL provide standards for service provisioning, operations, and delivery.
- Integrate processes – Connect siloed workflows into end-to-end pipelines that can be automated.
Outcomes from standardizing and automating processes:
- 80% reduction in deployment time [5]
- 68% faster recovery from incidents [6]
- 83% less unplanned downtime [7]
Best Practice #3: Implement Infrastructure-as-Code
Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a foundational practice for smooth hybrid cloud automation. With IaC, infrastructure components like networks, VMs, storage, and connection configurations are defined via code rather than manual processes.
This machine-readable approach allows you to easily replicate and adjust infrastructure across environments. IaC enables reliable, scalable automation.
IaC recommendations:
- Choose frameworks like Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation – These provide domain-specific languages to codify infrastructure.
- Start small – Begin with non-critical infrastructure, and prioritize incrementally automating configurations.
- Use version control – Maintain IaC scripts in source control repositories to track changes.
- Validate before deploying – Syntax checkers and linters improve quality.
The impact of implementing IaC well:
- 92% reduction in unplanned work for IT teams [8]
- 60x more frequent infrastructure deployments [9]
- 80% faster recovery from outages [10]
Best Practice #4: Adopt a DevOps Culture
Cultural challenges present some of the biggest barriers to hybrid cloud automation. Developers and IT ops teams often exist in silos and don’t prioritize collaboration. The result – disjointed processes that can‘t be automated.
Some key culture shifts needed:
- Promote shared ownership – Both app developers and IT play an equal role in delivery automation.
- Encourage communication – Daily standups and chat tools foster alignment.
- Use common tools and metrics – Provide integrated toolchains and KPIs that unite teams.
- Reward collaboration – Incentives and OKRs should revolve around joint ownership of app outcomes vs individual team metrics.
Adopting these DevOps principles ensures all players are invested in automation success.
Results of improving DevOps culture:
- 46x more frequent code deployments [11]
- 96% faster recovery from incidents[12]
- 77% higher change success rate [13]
Best Practice #5: Use Containers and Microservices
Monolithic application architectures limit what you can automate across hybrid environments. Migrating to a microservices model enables more automation.
With microservices, application functionality is broken down into independently deployable containers. For example, the media service, chat feature, and payment processing could each be isolated as a container.
This modular design makes scaling and adapting applications much easier through automation.
Recommendations for leveraging containers and microservices:
- Audit your monoliths – Identify functionality to break out into standalone containers.
- Standardize your containers – Create reusable containers for common capabilities like logging, security, messaging etc.
- Orchestrate with Kubernetes – Kubernetes automates container deployment, scaling, and availability.
- Implement service mesh – Tools like Istio provide cross-container communication and observability.
The benefits of containers and microservices:
- 46% faster time-to-market for new features [14]
- 72% reduction in development costs [15]
- 4x more frequent releases [16]
Best Practice #6: Monitor and Optimize Performance
To identify automation opportunities and continuously improve, you need clear visibility into application performance, user experience, and operations. AIOps platforms provide this insight via automation.
AIOps stands for Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations. It applies machine learning to large volumes of performance data from across your hybrid environments. This enables AIOps solutions to automatically:
- Detect anomalies
- Diagnose root causes
- Forecast problems before they occur
- Trigger remediation workflows
Recommendations for monitoring and optimizing via AIOps:
- Instrument applications and infrastructure – Collect metrics on user interactions, transactions, response times, uptime, resource consumption etc.
- Aggregate data into shared lake – Bring together monitoring data from all sources into an analytics platform.
- Implement advanced AIOps – Move beyond just thresholds and alerts to causation analysis powered by ML.
- Close loops with automation – Enable AIOps to trigger remediation like auto-scaling resources or restarting containers.
The impact of adding AIOps-driven automation:
- Up to 30% increase in operational efficiency [17]
- 65% faster root cause identification [18]
- Up to 50% lower MTTR [19]
Best Practice #7: Maintain Strong Security Across Environments
Hybrid cloud expands your organization‘s attack surface. It‘s critical to maintain consistent security controls and policies across your hybrid environments.
Some best practices for security automation:
- Standardize configurations & policies – Establish unified security configurations and compliance policies.
- Automate policy enforcement – Use tools like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to automatically enforce configurations and settings at scale.
- Centralize identity management – Implement single sign-on (SSO) and centralized authentication.
- Continuously scan & remediate – Automate vulnerability scanning across all resources and auto-remediate issues.
- Encrypt data – Leverage automation to encrypt data at rest and in transit consistently.
- Segment applications & data – Isolate sensitive workloads and data in private clouds or on-premise environments.
Benefits of automating security:
- Up to 45% faster response to threats [20]
- Up to 35% reduction in breach impacts [20]
- 97% less time spent on compliance audits [21]
Putting the Best Practices to Work
The automation best practices covered in this guide may seem extensive, but they don‘t have to be adopted all at once. Start by focusing on 1-2 areas with the biggest potential business impact. Win incremental buy-in by demonstrating value from your initial automation efforts.
Eventually, these best practices will enable your IT teams to spend less time on routine infrastructure management and more time innovating to drive the business forward.
If you need help getting started or want to discuss which approaches are best suited to your unique environment, please reach out! I‘m always happy to provide guidance to help you successfully unlock the benefits of hybrid cloud automation.
