Hosting environments can be Dedicated or Cloud based. In recent years more and more organizations combine both architectures to achieve scalability, performance and cost reduction.
Hosting company called Rackspace who developed Open Stack and is one of leading providers of Cloud solutions offers hybrid solution called RackConnect.
In summary RackConnect provides physical link between dedicated solution, typically firewall, load balancer and servers running DB services and cloud environment on other side containing WEB servers.
Main benefits of hybrid solution:
– Increased security for Cloud servers/services as all traffic is protected by dedicated/hardware firewall
– Scalability as it easy to quickly add more cloud servers if service demand spikes
– Hardware load balancer provides better performance and more configuration options
– Lower the cost on comparison with dedicated only environment
– Additional security layer provided by Cloud firewall service which is managed via Cloud Management Portal
Digram below will help understand RC architecture:
Diagram source: www.rackspace.com
Presented diagram specifies Brocade ADX as a application load balancer, but it’s possible to use other vendor’s device, for example F5 LTM so customer has a choice depending on needs, preferences and budget available.
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