choreo
2023/03/03
 
3 Mar, 2023 | 3 min read

Hybrid Data Planes on Choreo

  • Binura Gunasekara
  • Senior Technical Lead - WSO2
Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Introduction

Expanding further on Choreo’s multi-cloud capabilities, we’re pleased to announce that it now supports hybrid data planes, enabling you to deploy your services, APIs, and integrations seamlessly across different cloud providers, including the Choreo-managed Cloud Data Plane.

This new capability lets you set up deployment environments across multiple Kubernetes clusters, regardless of the underlying cloud provider(s). Hybrid data planes let you build a distributed deployment environment spanning multiple clouds, while providing the same rich feature set to develop, deploy, and manage your services, APIs, and integrations under a single pane of glass.

  • Go multi-cloud with Choreo - be cloud-agnostic with your modern application stack and allow your development teams to easily build multi-cloud capabilities without worrying about the underlying infrastructure and network complexities.
  • Migrate from the Choreo Cloud Data Plane to a private data plane - Hybrid data planes provide a seamless migration path from Choreo’s Cloud Data Plane to a private data plane that runs on your cloud infrastructure.
    • Choreo’s multi-tenanted Cloud Data Plane is great for teams to quickly get started by deploying APIs, applications, and integrations on the platform, but most enterprises prefer to have tighter control and ownership of where their workloads are run, both from a security and a compliance perspective. With hybrid data planes, you can now connect new private environments to your existing cloud data plane environments and easily promote your workloads across them, and then disable your organization’s cloud data plane.
    • If you already have a portfolio of components running in the Choreo Cloud Data Plane, and you’re considering upgrading to a private data plane on your own cloud infrastructure, a hybrid data plane will provide a seamless migration pathway to deploy your existing applications to the new private data plane.

How it Works: Going Multi-cloud with Choreo.

  • Organizations can connect Kubernetes clusters, container registries, and secret-management tooling from across different cloud providers - and create environments across them. Choreo will take care of the hardest parts: enabling seamless builds, deployments, and promotions (including pushing to different container registries and secret-management providers), and providing your developers with the seamless application deployment experience that they’re already familiar with. 

Figure 1: Promoting applications from the Choreo cloud data plane to environments in private data planes.

  • The environments and clusters (and the promotion flow) can be customized as needed. The above image is only an example scenario highlighting a hybrid data plane between the Choreo Cloud Data Plane and a private data plane on Azure.
  • Choreo abstracts away the underlying complexity of managing internal network connectivity, container registry, and secret-management integrations, providing you and your developers with a seamless (and familiar) experience on the Choreo Developer Platform.

Figure 2: The deploy page showing a hybrid deployment pipeline

How it Works: Transitioning From the Choreo-managed Cloud Data Plane to a Private Data Plane.

Hybrid data planes also provide a seamless migration pathway from the Choreo Cloud Data Plane to your organization’s private data plane.

This migration pathway is designed to be painless, allowing users to move their applications to their own private infrastructure at their leisure without experiencing any downtime or disruptions. The following section outlines how this transition is carried out.

  • At our starting point: Applications and APIs are deployed on the default Choreo Cloud Data Plane environments.

Figure 3: The default environments created for all projects on the cloud data plane

  • Migration: 
    • Step 1: A hybrid data plane is set up between the Choreo Cloud Data Plane and the user's private data plane. (Note: The environments, underlying clusters, and cloud services are omitted for brevity).

    • Step 2: Developers can ‘promote’ their existing components from the default environments on the Cloud Data Plane to the new set of environments created on their private data plane. This allows you to deploy your existing components to new environments while ensuring that existing production traffic is unaffected. This is because the deployments in the Cloud Data Plane will remain untouched.

    • Step 3: Cutover production traffic. Once the new deployments are tested in the new private data plane, the custom domains applied to the services can be updated to point to the services in the new environment as shown below.

Figure 4: Hybrid data plane with 2x environments on the cloud data plane and another 3x environments on a private data plane

  • Post-migration: 
    • The Choreo cloud plane is disabled (and removed) from the user’s organization once all the components have been promoted to the new private Data Plane environments. All new builds will be deployed to the new private environments.
    • However, this step is optional, and you can opt to keep this configuration if needed.

Figure 5: Post-migration - All deployment environments are now on the private data plane

Getting Started

If you’re already on the Choreo Cloud Data Plane and want to explore hybrid data planes for your organization, contact us. If you’re new to Choreo, sign up for free and try it today! 

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