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# Winning the Hybrid Cloud

Stop letting cumbersome VPNs and skyrocketing costs ruin your hybrid deployment. Discover how combining Skupper and Knative creates a highly resilient, serverless multi-cloud mesh.

- **Speakers:** [Alex Soto](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@alex-soto)
- **Event:** World Congress 2022
- **Published:** June 15, 2022
- **Duration:** 26:19
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/432-winning-the-hybrid-cloud

## Summary

Operating a hybrid cloud architecture empowers organizations to bridge public, private, and on-premises environments, unlocking crucial capabilities like regional data sovereignty, reduced global latency, and robust disaster recovery. However, navigating multi-cloud ecosystems traditionally introduces fragmented user interfaces, cumbersome VPN constraints, and significantly inflated infrastructure costs. Successfully securing a multi-cloud network requires replacing administrative friction with a consistent, flexible operational layer.

Kubernetes serves as the foundational deployment engine, establishing a unified developer experience regardless of the underlying cloud provider. To resolve complex inter-cluster networking without relying on customized firewall rules, teams can deploy Skupper. Operating as a Layer 7 service interconnect, Skupper secures all cross-cluster communication via mutual TLS and intelligently routes HTTP, gRPC, or TCP traffic behind the scenes. If a pod, region, or entire cloud provider experiences a failure or unacceptable latency spike, Skupper automatically detects the issue and redirects requests to healthy fallback clusters seamlessly.

Because maintaining redundant active workloads natively doubles resource expenditures, integrating Knative provides essential financial control through serverless scaling. By configuring inactive deployments to scale down to zero and dynamically scaling up only to meet active concurrency thresholds, organizations restrict their billing to exact compute consumption. When combined with stateful synchronization tools like CockroachDB to preserve data integrity across regions, this combined Skupper-and-Knative methodology delivers a fully GitOps-compatible, highly resilient, and uniquely economical multi-cloud mesh.

**Keywords:** hybrid cloud architecture, kubernetes interoperability, multi-cloud disaster recovery, data sovereignty compliance, skupper layer 7 interconnect, VPN-free networking, mutual TLS security, cross-cluster traffic routing, knative serverless scaling, scale-to-zero compute, dynamic workload scaling, cloud vendor lock-in mitigation, gitops YAML configuration, stateful database synchronization, cockroachdb multi-region

## Chapters

1. **Understanding the open hybrid cloud architecture model** (01:12) — How hybrid cloud environments seamlessly connect public, private, and on-premises infrastructure to avoid reliance on a single provider.
1. **Defining the core principles of open hybrid clouds** (02:24) — The key benefits of open hybrid clouds include operational consistency, deployment flexibility, vendor independence, and structural risk reduction.
1. **Evaluating the business advantages of hybrid cloud architectures** (04:52) — Distributed cloud systems ensure disaster recovery failovers, minimize latency for remote clients, and uphold strict data sovereignty requirements.
1. **Connecting Kubernetes clusters across clouds using Skupper proxies** (06:33) — Skupper provides secure layer-7 inter-cluster communications without requiring specialized virtual private networks or complex firewall routing rules.
1. **Rerouting traffic dynamically during backend failures with Skupper** (08:37) — In a multi-cluster configuration, Skupper proxies automatically redirect frontend traffic to secondary availability zones when primary backend nodes fail.
1. **Configuring and managing Skupper router latency deployments** (12:01) — Skupper routers can be configured to execute latency-based traffic routing while fully integrating with declarative GitOps deployment workflows.
1. **Reducing cloud compute costs through Knative serverless scaling** (15:10) — Knative serverless architectures enable teams to scale idle workloads directly to zero, aggressively minimizing costs for secondary failover clusters.
1. **Configuring Knative deployments to automatically scale under load** (17:06) — A Knative service can track incoming network requests to immediately provision additional application instances or aggressively terminate unused pods.
1. **Integrating Knative and Skupper for multi-cloud efficiency** (22:29) — Combining serverless scaling with intelligent cross-cluster routing dramatically optimizes compute expenditures while completely preserving highly resilient application architectures.
1. **Synchronizing stateful application databases across multiple cloud providers** (24:01) — Synchronized databases like CockroachDB preserve critical application state across disparate cloud boundaries to prevent data loss during catastrophic regional outages.

## Related Moments

- [Combining Skupper features with serverless frameworks](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/883-embracing-the-hybrid-cloud-unlocking-success-with-open-source-technologies) (from "Embracing the Hybrid Cloud: Unlocking Success with Open Source Technologies")
- [Running Kubernetes clusters efficiently on enterprise cloud platforms](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/89-development-of-reactive-applications-with-quarkus) (from "Development of reactive applications with Quarkus")
- [Using Knative for standardizing deployments on Kubernetes](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/443-going-serverless-using-the-spring-framework-ecosystem) (from "Going serverless using the Spring Framework ecosystem")
- [Selecting open source technologies for multi-cloud capability](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/814-serverless-architectures-with-spring-cloud-functions-and-knative) (from "Serverless Architectures with Spring Cloud Functions and Knative")
- [Bursting GPU capacity over hybrid Kubernetes networks](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100355-running-secure-life-science-research-at-scale-using-hybrid-gpu-hpc-and-kubernetes) (from "Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬")
- [Speaker background and open source Kubernetes edge computing projects](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100094-from-bytes-to-execution-writing-a-webassembly-runtime-in-rust) (from "From Bytes to Execution: Writing a WebAssembly Runtime in Rust")

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