Hybrid Cloud Management Challenges and Rainbond’s Solutions

Hybrid Cloud Application Scenarios

The article discusses the challenges and focal points of hybrid‑cloud scenarios and presents Rainbond’s solution for managing applications across multiple cloud platforms. By using a unified console to orchestrate containers across many clusters, it achieves consistent management of applications in hybrid clouds. It also describes Rainbond’s application‑template delivery, cross‑cloud team management, and other features that help users simplify cross‑cloud application delivery and operation.

Key Points of Hybrid Cloud Management

Hybrid‑cloud environments are far more complex than single private or public clouds. The main difficulties stem from differences among cloud providers, making unified management hard, and the lack of inter‑connectivity, which complicates data synchronization, consistency, and security.

Standardization across cloud platforms to reduce operational complexity.

Data consistency to avoid conflicts and loss during cross‑cloud synchronization.

Security to protect data and applications across different clouds.

User management that unifies identity across clouds, lowering administrative costs.

Functional Requirements in Hybrid Cloud Scenarios

Typical cross‑cloud functions required in hybrid‑cloud settings include:

Consistent operational experience that hides differences between clouds, allowing a single workflow for publishing and running applications across multiple environments.

Unified user management through a single console, drastically reducing management overhead.

Cross‑cloud migration and deployment to move applications seamlessly between clouds, enhancing flexibility and agility.

Multi‑cloud disaster recovery to switch workloads quickly when a cloud provider experiences an outage.

Cross‑cloud data management for backup, recovery, and data sharing across clouds, providing stronger flexibility and scalability.

Hybrid Cloud Construction Based on Rainbond

Rainbond, a cloud‑native application management platform, was designed with hybrid‑cloud management in mind. Its architecture separates the console and cluster‑side components. The console’s multi‑cloud module connects to and manages many clusters, while the cluster component can be deployed on any Kubernetes cluster—including standard Kubernetes, K3s, Alibaba Cloud ACK, Tencent Cloud TKE, etc.—and can use cloud‑specific services such as CSI‑provisioned Alibaba Cloud disks.

The Rainbond console provides a single entry point for multi‑cluster management, allowing users to publish applications to different cloud environments through a unified, easy‑to‑use workflow that is independent of underlying cloud differences.

Team Workspace Isolation

Rainbond builds a user system at the console level, independent of the underlying clouds, using its own RBAC model to control which cloud resources a user can access. Teams serve as an abstraction for workspace isolation; a team can be shared across clusters or dedicated to a single cluster. Once a user joins a team, they can use the resources provisioned for that team.

Shared mode: a team is enabled in multiple clusters, creating a namespace with the same name in each cluster, allowing team members to deploy services across all those clusters.

Dedicated mode: a namespace is created only in the specified cluster, restricting the team’s resources to that single cluster.

Based on this team abstraction, users can publish and manage applications, while Rainbond adds capabilities such as audit logging, resource quotas, and permission management.

Multi‑Cloud Disaster Recovery

Multi‑cloud disaster recovery ensures high availability by allowing applications to continue running on other clouds if one cloud fails. Rainbond’s multi‑cloud management provides a solid low‑level framework for this, but additional cloud‑provider services are often needed.

Key auxiliary capabilities include:

Intelligent network entry switching using CDN and smart DNS to route traffic to the nearest gateway and disable faulty cluster endpoints during outages.

Data synchronization services (e.g., Alibaba Cloud DTS) to keep business data consistent across clusters.

Dedicated private network links to securely transfer data between clusters, especially for cross‑cloud data sync.

Rainbond also offers backup and restore at two levels: platform‑level backup to recover the Rainbond system itself, and application‑level backup that captures persistent data, enabling full reconstruction after disasters.

Cross‑Cloud Application Deployment

In hybrid‑cloud settings, applications are first‑class citizens, and the ability to deploy them freely across clouds is a fundamental requirement. Rainbond addresses this by using application templates to break down cross‑cloud deployment barriers.

Traditional deployment of complex micro‑service systems involves dozens of YAML files and container images, which becomes even more painful across different cloud providers. Rainbond abstracts the entire micro‑service system into a single, manageable application.

By publishing an application as a template, it can be installed and upgraded with one click across multiple clusters, dramatically reducing delivery cost.

Conclusion

Hybrid‑cloud management is currently one of the hottest topics in cloud computing. Using Rainbond’s cloud‑native application management platform to build hybrid clouds can solve most of the difficulties and pain points. Looking ahead, Rainbond will continue to strengthen its hybrid‑cloud capabilities, integrate more diverse cloud resources, and extend solutions to edge‑computing scenarios through projects such as Kubedge.