Roll out hybrid clouds with Ansible automation

Mixing Allowed

According to reliable estimates, half of all corporations will be operating a hybrid cloud architecture by next year. Obviously, the advantages of mixing the historic IT landscape, which physically resides in-house, and public or private clouds from external service providers is something that appeals to admins. Lower running costs are often the deciding factor in favor of hybrid setups. In many cases, however, the combination also might have functional advantages. Companies with hybrid IT structures are said to be more successful than their competitors [1].

The reason the hybrid cloud is not yet widely used is probably because of the great effort needed to set it up. In this article, I seek to demonstrate that every admin can take a considerable step toward achieving a hybrid cloud with little effort, while gaining enough experience to outsource more parts of the local IT structure. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example, I show how you can use two Linux virtual machines (VMs) to build a secure infrastructure that is even capable of multitenancy. The best part is that you do not need to do all this work yourself; instead, Ansible will carry out the setup steps. (For more information on Ansible, refer to earlier articles in this magazine [2]–[4].)

Many users still think that VMs in the cloud are always publicly available. However, administrators who have been involved with virtual network infrastructures, such as AWS or Azure, know that private networks, VPNs, and routers are also common in the cloud. AWS and Azure even offer VPNs to the private corporate network as a (commercial) service (see the "Amazon Network Glossary" box).

Amazon Network Glossary

The AWS Elastic

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