Key Lessons for Going Hybrid with Your Digital Infrastructure

There’s a huge range of infrastructure options on the market, ranging from on-premises setups and colocation services to bare metal hosting and cloud solutions. Each comes with advantages and drawbacks that need to be navigated and weighed against business needs.

For example, hyperscale cloud platforms are highly scalable but often come with a hefty price tag. Colocation, while more cost-effective, needs an in-house team of experts to manage physical infrastructure. Then there’s bare metal, which typically strikes a balance between flexibility and control.

However, this doesn’t mean that businesses only need to choose one. Instead, many are now choosing a hybrid infrastructure approach, combining the best of each solution to create custom, highly agile infrastructure solutions that are cost effective and tailored to their specific needs. But what are the key lessons to keep in mind when going hybrid?

Balancing Cost and Scalability

By creating a hybrid set up of bare metal hosting for predictable workloads and hyperscale cloud capabilities for burst capacity during periods of increased demand, businesses can benefit from greater cost efficiencies without compromising on the scalability of their infrastructure. 

Take the launch of a new video game as an example. With player numbers unknown it makes sense to launch the game on a mixture of hyperscale cloud and bare metal.

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As player numbers stabilize, the game studio can then move the majority of their infrastructure onto bare metal – with hyperscale cloud there to provide burst capacity during busy periods, such as weekends and for DLCs.

This ability to fine-tune how infrastructure is used ensures that a business only pays for the resources it needs, avoiding the high costs associated with full-time hyperscale cloud reliance.

Optimizing Performance

Hybrid infrastructure also offers performance benefits by allowing businesses to allocate different tasks to the most suitable infrastructure type.

While hyperscale cloud offerings are often praised as a versatile solution capable of large workloads, hyperscale cloud environments can suffer from dips in performance as a result of sharing resources.

If other users on the same server are completing resource intensive tasks, performance can slow down entirely.

By incorporating dedicated server hosting – whether colocation, on-premise or hosted by an infrastructure as a service provider - businesses can ensure that mission-critical applications run on dedicated hardware, avoiding the risk of poor performance that can happen due to sharing cloud resources.

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And, by having the flexibility of hyperscale cloud services on hand, businesses can burst into the cloud for the tasks that demand it.

Geographical Considerations 

Adopting hybrid infrastructure isn't just a solution to better optimize workloads, it can also help a business adapt to new geographical growth.

A company with a central office and all its operations in one physical location might initially opt for colocation, which would offer them high performance infrastructure for a reasonable rate.

However, as the company begins serving international customers, expanding infrastructure into new regions, using colocation alone becomes more complex and less efficient.

Setting up physical infrastructure in different locations can be costly and resource intensive. A more effective solution is to utilize infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from a cloud or bare metal provider, which allows for rapid server deployment in new regions without the need for a dedicated local team to manage the associated hardware.

By balancing colocation at their home base and the use of IaaS services for international operations, a business can scale more easily and respond to new markets without excessive overheads.

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Application Requirements for Hybrid Infrastructure

With many different infrastructure types on offer, over time it has become clear that certain applications simply perform better on particular infrastructure types.

For instance, database-heavy applications tend to operate more efficiently on bare metal servers in comparison to virtualized environments like hyperscale cloud, which can slow down processing.

However, hyperscale cloud environments offer good flexibility and scalability for testing activities, as resources can be allocated as and when they are needed.

Hybrid infrastructure enables a business to place certain parts of their application stack on the infrastructure that best suits.

So, production environments might benefit from the stability and performance of bare metal hosting, while development tasks could take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model that is typically offered by hyperscale cloud providers.

Is Hybrid Infrastructure the Right Choice?

Despite the positives, hybrid infrastructure isn’t always the right choice. Organizations that are very early on in their development may not yet know their infrastructure requirements, making a single infrastructure type, like hyperscale cloud hosting, a more practical - albeit temporary - option.

That said, companies with highly predictable workloads may not need the flexibility that a hybrid or hyperscale cloud infrastructure solution provides. If infrastructure demands remain constant and manageable, investing in one well-suited infrastructure type, like bare metal, may offer a simpler and more cost-effective solution.

While setting up a hybrid infrastructure can be relatively straightforward, businesses should be aware of potential challenges.

Many companies optimize for scalability without fully understanding how their applications will function across different environments, which in turn, can lead to inefficiencies and certain applications not scaling down as easily as they scale up.

Likewise, businesses can also make the mistake of selecting infrastructure providers without fully evaluating their capabilities, only to find out later that their services are unsuitable or do not allow for future growth.

Hybrid infrastructure needs to be effectively monitored to ensure success, but with the right approach, it can offer a business the freedom to customize its infrastructure stack in light of multiple needs, including growth plans and cost and performance requirements.

With the correct strategy in place, it can provide a flexible, future-proof infrastructure solution to optimize operations.