Building a hybrid cloud in five minutes

Have you ever migrated an application or domain from one service to another? If you have, you know it's not always easy. In most cases, it can be time-consuming, stressful, and very expensive. But that's all changing, thanks to cloud computing. In this post, we are going to show you how you can migrate your existing on-prem DNS to a cloud provider in a matter of minutes. Now, this is easy to say for small businesses and users with only a handful of domains. But what if you're an enterprise with hundreds, thousands of domains with complex configurations?That's where the hybrid cloud comes in. Essentially, you will move small amounts of traffic over to your cloud host until your entire system is off of your on-prem network.In most cases, this can take anywhere from a few days to months to transition completely and securely.

You can accomplish this using load balancing services like Weighted Round Robin. In Constellix you would set this up using the Pools feature. A pool is a group of endpoints (IP addresses or hostnames). Each endpoint can be configured to serve varying loads of traffic.

Use Case 1:

Let’s set up a pool in Constellix that will contain two end points: your current on-prem data center and your new cloud server.Since our pools will consist of hostnames, we will be using CNAME record pools. The same actions can be applied to A record pools and ANAME record pools, just substitute hostnames with IP addresses.We want to transition slowly, so we will set the weights to:

On prem: 9Cloud: 1

Make sure you set the Minimum Available endpoints to two. This will make sure that traffic will always have the chance to be sent to either pool.Once you create a pool, you will have the option to associate the endpoint with a Sonar check. These checks constantly monitor your endpoint to see if it is active. In Constellix DNS, you can set Policies that will only serve traffic to endpoints if they are active.Now we need to create a record that uses the pool we made.

Once you commit your changes, anytime a user queries www.example.xyz:

10% of traffic will we answered by your cloud-based network90% will be answered by the on-prem network

Tune in next week for our second use case, where we will show you how to create a hybrid cloud with location-specific rules.