For enterprises, the single public cloud or private cloud model can no longer meet the diverse business needs. The hybrid cloud architecture is a compliant solution that combines public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure, and has become an important trend in the organizational structure design of large and medium-sized enterprises. The core concept of the hybrid cloud architecture is to uniformly manage and schedule computing, storage, and network resources in different environments through a unified platform or interface, achieving goals such as elastic resource expansion, security controllability, cost optimization, and flexible deployment. In practical applications, hybrid cloud can also achieve differentiated deployment, reducing costs and improving efficiency in combination with actual application scenarios, as follows.
A large financial group operates multiple branches across the country. The user transaction data it processes daily is huge and involves sensitive information. Therefore, strict control is required in terms of compliance and security. The group partially deploys the core trading system in the private cloud data center, ensuring the low latency and high reliability of the core financial business through high-performance local servers and dedicated line networks. Meanwhile, edge services such as customer service, APP interfaces, and marketing activities are deployed on public cloud platforms, taking advantage of the elastic scalability of public cloud resources to cope with access fluctuations and avoid resource waste and performance bottlenecks. In terms of data interaction, this architecture uses API gateways and service buses to decoupled the interfaces between private clouds and public clouds, and builds a secure tunnel through private networks and IPSec to ensure the security and compliance of data transmission. It truly realizes a hybrid cloud model where the core business is controlled on the cloud and the peripheral business is flexibly expanded.
Another Internet education platform adopts a hybrid cloud strategy to address the demands of high-concurrency live-streaming classes and data analysis. The live streaming function of this platform is deployed in multiple availability zones of a certain public cloud. It achieves low-latency video distribution worldwide through CDN acceleration, meeting the requirements of high-concurrency access scenarios. The management of teaching resource content and the storage of student learning data are constructed in a private cloud. The containerized management platform is utilized to uniformly orchestrate and schedule teaching microservices, achieving rapid iteration and security controllability. During the peak period of examinations or when there is a sudden increase in users, the platform automatically expands the capacity to direct the load to public cloud nodes, dynamically achieving mixed resource invocation and enhancing the system's elastic capacity. This type of hybrid cloud architecture can balance system performance and cost control, meeting the triple requirements of the online education industry for real-time performance, stability and data security.
A certain smart factory in the manufacturing industry achieves the collaborative operation of edge computing and centralized data management through a hybrid cloud. The equipment acquisition system and workshop monitoring service within the factory are processed locally through private clouds and edge servers, achieving millisecond-level control responses. Data is uploaded in real time to the private data lake for internal operation monitoring, while big data such as equipment operation logs and production analysis results are simultaneously uploaded to the public cloud for deep learning and model training. Through hybrid deployment, the factory can fully leverage the cloud AI capabilities to optimize predictive maintenance and capacity scheduling, while ensuring that core production data does not leave the factory area. In terms of cloud connection, the SD-WAN solution is adopted to connect the hybrid network, achieve fast and secure multi-site connection, and improve the flexibility and availability of the overall architecture.
A certain chain enterprise in the retail industry adopts a hybrid cloud to integrate the online mall and offline store systems. Its core back-end modules such as CRM and commodity inventory management are deployed in the private cloud, facilitating centralized control and internal integration. The online mall, APP and e-commerce event system are deployed on multiple public cloud platforms, ensuring stable operation during the event period through load balancing and cross-cloud deployment. At the same time, the resource conditions of each cloud platform are uniformly monitored through the multi-cloud management platform to achieve rapid business launch and strategy distribution. For key data paths such as payment interfaces and ERP systems, distributed middleware is adopted for link optimization, and combined with cloud security services for unified auditing and permission management, thereby achieving smooth end-to-end business interaction on the basis of ensuring data consistency.
Hybrid cloud is also widely adopted by government departments and the medical industry to address the dual issues of sensitive data processing and efficient access to public services. A certain municipal government system adopts a three-layer hybrid architecture of "government private cloud + public cloud backup + emergency expansion cloud" to ensure that data is retained locally for a long time and to support large-scale access pressure with the high-performance nodes of the public cloud in case of emergencies. A certain tertiary hospital stores patient data in a private cloud or local data center, rather than deploying non-real-time image data analysis and clinical model training on GPU public clouds, achieving a balance between computing power and data privacy. Both enhance the service capabilities and security of government and medical information systems through a hybrid cloud architecture
Combining the above cases, what we can know is that the advantage of the hybrid cloud architecture lies in resource integration, and more importantly, in the flexible allocation of resources based on business characteristics and development stages, enabling the system to achieve a dynamic balance in multiple aspects such as performance, cost, security, compliance, and operation and maintenance.
