White Paper - True Hybrid and Multi-Cloud with OpenNebula

To support digital transformation initiatives, IT departments need the right blend of cloud environments—on-premises, public, and edge—tailored for a variety of existing and emerging use cases. There are many reasons why organizations make use of cloud services from multiple providers. Avoiding vendor lock-in, increased agility and service availability, more efficient costs, and the promise of obtaining the best possible solution from each provider are all too great to ignore. However, organizations face many challenges in the quest for complete freedom in their application workloads across different clouds, including, among others: the heterogeneity of interfaces and formats, with significant numbers of applications requiring considerable refactoring to migrate to the cloud; security concerns; cost control; lack of resources and expertise; the need for cultural changes in IT teams; and management complexity. Multi-cloud is undoubtedly here to stay.

Our goal is to make its more sophisticated incarnations easier to deploy and manage. Since version 6.0, OpenNebula offers a powerful multi-cloud architecture composed of Edge Clusters that can run any application—Virtual Machines workloads and containerized applications from Kubernetes—on any resource—bare-metal or virtualized—anywhere—on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. This innovative model enables true hybrid and multi-cloud computing by combining public and private cloud operations with workload portability and unified management of IT infrastructure and applications.

This white paper describes the principles at the base of our multi-cloud architecture, and lays the groundwork for how, with OpenNebula, you can exploit the many benefits of a multi-cloud model.