What is a hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a mixed deployment strategy in which services, data, and infrastructure components are spread across private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises environments. Each of these environments has its own provisionable storage and computing resources. Companion solutions such as cloud meshes or service meshes help bridge the gap between these environments — enabling communication and data exchange between distributed services.

How do hybrid clouds work?

Hybrid setups are popular with organizations that need the flexibility to run workloads in numerous locations and scale quickly with demand — while keeping sensitive services and their data separated (either physically or logically) for security and compliance. They allow teams to pick and choose the platforms that best match their use cases, budgets, and infrastructure requirements without lock-in. There's no single approach that's objectively best.

Organizations often turn to centralized management suites to help manage these mixed environments more seamlessly. While cloud platforms offer their own monitoring and administrative tools (typically web-based), third-party platforms also deliver integrated management software that supports the industry's top cloud providers.

Hybrid-cloud setups enable organizations to adopt numerous other solutions that have gained popularity in the public-cloud space — such as various software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. 

Going serverless is also appealing to development teams who want to run application code without worrying about provisioning backend servers. The vendor platform handles this task and frees up teams to make impacts elsewhere. This approach is one hallmark of modern hybrid-cloud computing, in which spreading workloads across clouds is advantageous. Quite often, these workloads run within containers as microservices.

What are the benefits of hybrid cloud?

Hybrid-cloud infrastructure affords teams and organizations the following benefits: 

• Flexibility – Organizations can deploy within a combination public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments. They can choose the platforms best suited for their technical and business needs. 

• Cost savings – With the flexibility to build their own infrastructure, organizations can choose platforms, third-party tools, and provisioning strategies aligned with budgetary constraints. 

• Easier modernization – Organizations can adopt modern deployment strategies (such as containerization) more readily, and can shift workloads and app traffic as rapidly or gradually as needed between clouds. 

• Security and compliance – Organizations can physically segregate their data from sensitive applications, or keep data logically separated when privacy and security requirements aren't as stringent. This flexibility is critical in industries such as healthcare, finance, and government. 

• On-demand scalability – Hybrid setups can readily provision more resources to handle traffic spikes and prevent bottlenecks, without the need to buy vastly more capacity than what's normally needed, just in case.

• High availability – When one infrastructure component experiences a fault, automatic failover measures are ready to shift traffic to working instances — while cloud backups simplify disaster recovery.

Does HAProxy support hybrid cloud?

Yes! HAProxy One — the world's fastest application delivery and security platform — powers modern applications, APIs, and AI/LLM services at any scale and in any environment. This includes private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and on-premises deployments. HAProxy One also makes it easy to seamlessly connect services hosted on different clouds with ultra-low latency and multi-layered security features. 

To learn more about public cloud support in HAProxy, check out our cloud-specific installation instructions or our blog post, Why your load balancer should be fast & flexible.