AWS provides the tools and solutions to integrate your existing on-premises resources with the AWS Cloud. By using AWS to enhance and extend your capabilities, without giving up the investments you’ve already made, you can greatly accelerate your adoption of cloud computing.
Hybrid architectures usually involve integration of networking, storage, access control, and management. The breadth of AWS services, along with the strength of our partner ecosystem, provides a wide array of options for developing the architecture that best meets your organization's needs.
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AWS provides the networking, storage, access control, and management capabilities to enable hybrid architectures. Additionally, the AWS Marketplace can help you deploy the software you already use on-premises into the cloud quickly.
Flexible network connectivity is a cornerstone of integrating distributed environments, including AWS and your existing on-premises equipment. With Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), you can extend your on-premise network configuration into your virtual private networks on the AWS Cloud. AWS resources will operate as if they are part of your existing corporate network.
You can also extend your physical connectivity using AWS Direct Connect, which provides dedicated, consistent, private networking between your data center and the AWS regions of your choice. Together, Amazon VPC and AWS Direct Connect allow you to seamlessly integrate your existing infrastructure with the elastic, scalable resources available in the AWS Cloud.
Within your logically isolated network, Amazon VPC provides complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
For example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your webservers that has access to the Internet, and place your backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing subnet with no Internet access. You can leverage multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet.
Additionally, you can create a Hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection between your corporate datacenter and your VPC and leverage the AWS cloud as an extension of your corporate datacenter.
Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish a dedicated network connection between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment. In many cases, this can provide both lower costs and a higher level of service than Internet-based connections.
With industry standard 802.1q VLANs, this dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces. This allows you to use the same connection to access public resources such as objects stored in Amazon S3 using public IP address space, and private resources such as Amazon EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using private IP space, while maintaining network separation between the public and private environments. Virtual interfaces can be reconfigured at any time to meet your changing needs.
AWS Direct Connect is compatible with all AWS services.
AWS helps simplify the backup and recovery environment for the enterprise. You can leverage the on-demand nature of the cloud and automate your backup and recovery processes so they are not only less complex and lightweight, but also easy to manage and maintain. Storage services with AWS are designed to provide 99.999999999% durability, so you can feel confident your backups are protected.
On-premises connection with AWS is best accomplished with AWS Storage Gateway, a software appliance installed in your data center with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization’s existing IT environment and the AWS storage infrastructure. Using industry standard storage protocols, the service allows you to store data in the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon Glacier.
Amazon S3 provides a highly durable, scalable, and secure storage infrastructure that is well-suited for backing up and archiving your critical data. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. To increase durability, Amazon S3 synchronously stores your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data. Unlike traditional systems that can require laborious data verification and manual repair, Amazon S3 performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.
You can use Amazon S3’s versioning capability to provide even further protection for your stored data. Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your Amazon S3 bucket. This allows you to easily recover from both unintended user actions and application failures.
The AWS Storage Gateway’s software appliance is available for download as a virtual machine (VM) image that you install on a host in your datacenter. Once you’ve installed your gateway and associated it with your AWS Account through our activation process, you can use the AWS Management Console to create either Gateway-Cached or Gateway-Stored storage volumes that can be mounted as iSCSI devices by your on-premises applications.
Gateway-Cached Volumes allow you store your primary data in Amazon S3, and retain your frequently accessed data locally. Gateway-Cached volumes provide substantial cost savings on primary storage, minimize the need to scale your storage on-premises, and retain low-latency access to your frequently accessed data.
In the event you need low-latency access to your entire data set, you can configure your on-premises gateway to store your primary data locally as Gateway-Stored Volumes, and asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of this data to Amazon S3. Gateway-Stored volumes provide durable and inexpensive off-site backups that you can recover locally or from Amazon EC2 if, for example, you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery.
AWS Storage Gateway also supports virtual tape libraries using Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier.
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
Amazon Glacier’s model makes it ideal for enterprise archiving. Examples include email, legal records, and financial and business documents. This data is often retained for years or decades, but is accessed infrequently. Amazon Glacier allows you to cost-effectively and securely store this data offsite; making it simple, inexpensive, and safe to retain archived data for as long as desired.
Amazon Glacier is also well suited to replace on-premises or offsite tape libraries. Although magnetic tape-based storage can be cost-effective when operated at scale, it can be a drain on resources as one (or more) tape libraries need to be maintained (often in geographically distinct locations). This typically requires specialized personnel and processes, and it takes up valuable space in data centers. Replacing your tape library with Amazon Glacier removes the burden of managing these operational challenges.
Adopting cloud computing doesn’t have to mean you’re adopting a new identity management strategy. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. You can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.
Additionally, AWS Directory Service is a managed service that allows you to connect your AWS resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud.
Finally, you can further protect your AWS environment by using AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), a security feature available at no extra cost that augments username and password credentials. MFA requires users to prove physical possession of a hardware or virtual MFA device by providing a valid MFA code.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) supports identity federation for delegated access to the AWS Management Console or AWS APIs, such as an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table.
With identity federation, external identities (federated users) are granted secure access to resources in your AWS account without having to create IAM users. These external identities can come from any identity management solution that supports SAML 2.0; such as your corporate directory (for example Windows Active Directory); or from a 3rd party such as Login with Amazon, Facebook, and Google .
By integrating your on-premises identity management and AWS, you can quickly implement single sign-on (SSO), addition/deletion of users, and fine-grained AWS resource access using your existing identity management solution.
AWS Directory Service is a managed service that allows you to connect your AWS resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud.
Connecting to an on-premises directory is a simple process. Once this connection is established, all users can access AWS resources and applications with their existing corporate credentials. You can also launch managed, Samba-based directories in a matter of minutes, simplifying the deployment and management of Microsoft Windows workloads in the AWS Cloud.
All AWS services are driven by robust APIs that allow for a wide variety of monitoring and management tools to integrate easily with your AWS Cloud resources. Common tools from vendors such as Microsoft, VMware, BMC Software, Okta, RightScale, Eucalyptus, CA, Xceedium, Symantec, Racemi, and Dell already support AWS, and that’s just naming a few.
It’s likely that many of the tools that your organization is using to manage your on-premises environments can be extended to included manage AWS as well. Integrating your AWS environment can provide a simpler and quicker path for cloud adoption, because your operations team does not need to learn new tools or develop completely new processes.
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AWS OpsWorks is a application management service that makes it easy to deploy and operate applications in the AWS Cloud or in your own data center. You can define the application’s architecture and the specification of each component, including package installation, software configuration, and resources. Start from templates for common technologies like application servers and databases, or build your own to perform any task that can be scripted.
By using OpsWorks within your data center, you no longer need to operate separate application management tools or pay up-front licensing costs to manage applications that run on-premises, on AWS, or in a hybrid architecture. Additionally, OpsWorks' integration with Amazon CloudWatch allows you to use a single tool to create alarms or scale servers/instances based on CPU, memory, and load metrics in a hybrid environment.
AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to instances, both in AWS and on-premises, making it easier for you to rapidly release new features, avoid downtime during deployment, and handle the complexity of updating your applications. AWS CodeDeploy eliminates the need for error-prone manual operations, and the service scales with your infrastructure so you can easily deploy to one instance or thousands.
CodeDeploy is built using many of the lessons learned from Amazon’s internal deployment systems, and it focuses on coordinating the rollout of application updates in a way that’s clear, reproducible, and non-impactful to application users. By using CodeDeploy for deployments both on-premises and in the cloud, your deployment toolset and processes can be streamlined across both environments.
