Hybrid Cloud with Kubernetes — On-Premise and Cloud Under One Roof

Not every workload belongs in the public cloud. Regulation, latency, costs — there are plenty of reasons for on-premise. Hybrid cloud with Kubernetes gives us the flexibility to run workloads where they make sense.

Why Hybrid¶

• Regulation: sensitive data must remain in the local jurisdiction
• Latency: IoT edge processing needs low latency
• Costs: constant workloads are cheaper on-premise
• Legacy: some systems aren’t cloud-ready

Kubernetes as an Abstraction¶

Kubernetes runs the same on-premise and in the cloud. Deployment YAML is identical. The differences are in storage, networking, and IAM — we parameterize those in Helm values per environment.

Multi-Cluster Management¶

Rancher as a central management plane. One dashboard for the on-premise cluster in Prague and the GKE cluster in Frankfurt. Centralized RBAC, monitoring, logging.

Challenges¶

Networking: VPN/IPsec tunnel between on-premise and cloud. Latency of 10-20ms. Problematic for synchronous cross-cluster communication — design services so they don’t need cross-cluster sync calls.

Data synchronization: active-active databases across clusters is complex. We solve it with event-driven architecture — Kafka MirrorMaker for event replication.

Hybrid Is a Pragmatic Choice¶

All-in cloud isn’t always realistic. Hybrid cloud with Kubernetes provides flexibility — and the Kubernetes abstraction minimizes vendor lock-in.