Less than a year since we announced general availability, Native Hybrid Cloud is quickly becoming the most feature rich way to run cloud-native applications on-premises. At VMworld, we announced a number of new enhancements to Native Hybrid Cloud that broaden our production capabilities, bring new use cases for high availability and disaster recovery, and help solidify our position that we are the best way to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry on-premises.
As part of our core mission to help our customers succeed with their digital transformation initiatives, we’ve been working closely with our customers, taking direct feedback on how to improve Native Hybrid Cloud. Our conversations with customers have reflected the evolution of digital maturity in the market. A year ago, our customers were struggling simply to stand up a cloud-native platform to begin experimenting and developing next generation applications. Today, they are looking for more robust, production ready platforms to bring these applications to market.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and Elastic Cloud Storage Delivers High Availability to the Enterprise
In order to deliver a fault tolerant and production ready environment of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, we are offering ‘out-of-the-box’ deployments for multiple levels of high availability. At the smallest configuration, customers will be able to run multiple availability zones on a single site with physical and logical separation of resources. Pivotal recommends running multiple availability zones to assure platform health and performance, and this architecture offers you the ability to choose the level of redundancy necessary for running mission critical applications with minimal risk of applications going down.
To help avoid downtime due to a site failure, multi-site deployments provide the ability to run a full Native Hybrid Cloud in each site in an active-active configuration. Multi-site architectures provide an additional level of fault tolerance and resiliency that even if site 1 goes down, the Native Hybrid Cloud foundation at Site 2 can come alive and applications will continue to run. This architecture offers built-in layers of disaster recovery to ensure zero disruption and full application availability even in the loss of an entire site.
In a geo-replicated environment with multiple sites, ECS replicates chunks from the primary site to a remote site to provide high availability.
Elastic Cloud Storage’s robust fault tolerance and innate high availability standards ensure customers can recover from virtually any disaster scenario. Today, Native Hybrid Cloud components are backed up to Elastic Cloud Storage, while the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Elastic Runtime Blobstore lives on the platform as well. This ensures no single point of failure for applications running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and a secure backup for your logging data.
For customers running multi-site deployments, Elastic Cloud Storage’s geo-replication capabilities enable recovery of their logging and monitoring data even in the event of complete hardware loss. When used in combination with Pivotal’s recommended backup practices for the Pivotal Stack, it allows customers to easily recover, rebuild, and resume their Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances with no data loss.
Network Isolation gives an additional level of security and compliance for customers who deal with sensitive applications and data. This allows operators to segment portions of the network and limit who has access to different areas of the platform such as data services, applications, and the management plane. Giving operators greater control and visibility over the platform network traffic, secure network isolation improves security of the applications, and the infrastructure for those customers who want this level of security and compliance.
Simplifying Enterprise Deployments With Developer and Operator Tools
With additional levels of redundancy, availability and security comes the risk of an increase in system complexity. Managing multiple foundations and multiple sites of a cloud-native platform is challenging for even the most seasoned operators and organizations, and even more so for those just starting off their digital initiatives. We’ve thought of that, which is why to help manage these challenges and to fulfill our commitment to our customers, we developed the Workbench within Native Hybrid Cloud, a series of tools designed to help developers and operators become productive on Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Day 1.
The Workbench includes two tools, the Access Testing Tool and our newest, the Deployment Management Tool. Codenamed ‘Fractal’, the Deployment Management Tool is designed to further automate the CI/CD pipeline by managing the application deployment and configurations of multiple foundations simultaneously. With this, developers simply submit their code, and when it’s ready to go live, operators can use a single ‘fractal push’ to automatically push the application across their entire production environment in a blue-green deployment to ensure minimal disruption. The Access Testing Tool is focusing on helping developers easily diagnose and resolve connectivity issues during the development process. Developers can simply select the data and web services their applications need access to, and see whether their applications will have permission to those services when it’s in a production environment.
Native Hybrid Cloud 1.4 is packed with production ready features solidifying it as the best way to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry on-premises. Learn more about Native Hybrid Cloud and get hands on with our interactive demos to see just how easy it is to deploy and manage applications with our platform.
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