How to build a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure with Elastic Metal

Thierry Dupré, System Administrator at Webedia Group, and Thomas Gatignon, Lead Product Marketing Manager at Scaleway, hosted a webinar on How to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure with Elastic Metal, our bare metal servers in the cloud. Many developers are looking for a way to leverage the benefits of both the public and the private cloud, often by having an IaaS infrastructure on top of dedicated servers that fits their cloud ecosystem and processes. Thierry and Thomas demonstrated how this is possible by building a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud

What is a private cloud?

The private cloud is an infrastructure on dedicated servers, which can either be your own or rented.

Private cloud requires longer deployment times than the public cloud, but generally, the costs are more stable because the services and fees are outlined in a contract with the provider. With a private cloud configuration, you’ll have to maintain and manage the resources yourself, including the hardware. If you rent servers, most of the maintenance and management could be delegated to the provider, but you will still have far more maintenance to orchestrate than on the Public Cloud.

This hands-on setup enables you to fully control your infrastructure. For instance, you can choose your software layers and all the operating systems–including Windows, which can be challenging to find on Instances in general. You can also install the hypervisor of your choice, thus ensuring maximum control over your infrastructure’s security.

What is a public cloud?

Public Cloud is a whole other model compared to the private cloud. With Public Cloud, the infrastructure is fully shared, even though most cloud providers propose a large range of Instances with dedicated resources.
As such, you won’t have any maintenance on your infrastructure, as your cloud provider handles everything.

Public Cloud is a great option for applications where you have to easily and quickly scale your infrastructure.

The control and security of your infrastructure can be adapted depending on the cloud provider’s stack, but you won’t have full and complete control over everything. The cloud provider will manage some aspects of the security to ensure a secure and consistent platform.

Public cloud also provides access to a total cloud ecosystem, which includes managed services that complement their infrastructure offer, allowing for easy and efficient scaling.

Hybrid Cloud

There will be times when you will need to leverage the public cloud’s simplicity and the private cloud’s dedicated infrastructure–at the same time. Having both would be great– you’d have your choice of infrastructure, easy deployment, and the ability to customize control and security depending on your application.

However, for historical and/or technological reasons, the two are often strictly separated, either in different providers, or on different consoles, networks, or billing patterns.

For public and private clouds to work together successfully, you must link and (hopefully) manage them easily and safely.

Here is a schema of a hybrid cloud standard. The private and public cloud each work in its own private network, and you have to build your own secure communication lines to link them and make it hybrid.

The 3 pillars of Elastic Metal

Elastic Metal is our bare metal on the cloud offer. We built Elastic Metal to offer a path to hybrid cloud infrastructure for those who were looking for a dedicated server with a flexible IaaS infrastructure, that fits in the cloud ecosystem and enables the latest technologies.

Dedicated performance
First and foremost, the Elastic Metal servers are pure bare metal, dedicated servers. This means they are 100% dedicated to you, with predictable and consistent performance, with the full extent of software customization.

Flexible Billing
In the past, dedicated servers were only proposed with a monthly subscription. Elastic Metal brings flexibility to the dedicated world by offering both monthly or hourly billing. As a result, you can test an Elastic Metal server and make informed decisions based on your needs and their evolution.

No prior notice is required–you can rent the server at your convenience.

Being able to get a bare-metal machine like you would provision VMs brings more flexibility to your architecture.

Cloud Native Integration
We integrated Elastic Metal into our full cloud ecosystem, so you’ll be able to use the same console, the same developer tools, and most of our cloud services to manage Elastic Metal like the rest of our ecosystem.

Building a hybrid cloud infrastructure

The ability to have, in the same private network, your public cloud Instances and private cloud dedicated servers, unlocks hybrid cloud.

You can make your own virtualization, have Windows, and run Instances all on the same private network. And of course, you can add the services we have in our cloud ecosystem: public gateways, load balancers, managed databases, or whatever you would need.

All is managed by the same tools. For example, you can use Terraform to build your infrastructure, or the CLI if you want to use the API–everything is managed the same way.

Hybrid Cloud: the Webedia Group case

In the webinar, Thierry Dupré, System Administrator at Webedia Group, explained how they built their hybrid cloud infrastructure at Eklablog, migrating from Dedibox to Elastic Metal. He also shared their tooling stack, and how it all worked together.

This move to Elastic Metal allowed them to pay less for more storage, with better performance, and allowed them to progressively adopt a hybrid setup split between Elastic Metal, VMs, and potentially a managed Kubernetes for the stateless workload.

What’s next?

Elastic Metal is not done evolving. We plan to extend the Elastic Metal range of products to give you more choices of servers. We will also deploy and expand geographically with both new AZ and new regions.

But there is one thing we are particularly excited to be working on: a new installation system. We are rebuilding our installation mechanisms to have Elastic Metal ready as fast as humanly possible and to enable more customization–particularly in terms of partitioning.

We also have some options we are working on to increase further the compatibility and interactions with our cloud ecosystem. We are working on Block Storage for Elastic Metal to be able to expand your storage easily just like you do on Instances.