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Hybrid Cloud Strategies: Bridging Harvester HCI and AWS Outposts for Low-Latency Workloads

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Harvester is a modern, open-source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution built on Kubernetes. This article explores how Harvester can serve as a cost-effective, on-premises foundation for hybrid cloud architectures, seamlessly integrating with AWS Outposts and EKS Anywhere to deliver low-latency workloads at the edge.

The Hybrid Cloud Challenge ​

Enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud strategies to balance the scalability of public clouds like AWS with the data sovereignty and latency requirements of on-premises infrastructure. Harvester provides a compelling solution by offering a cloud-native HCI platform that runs on bare metal, effectively turning your datacenter into a private cloud region.

Harvester: Kubernetes-Native HCI ​

Unlike traditional virtualization platforms (VMware, Nutanix), Harvester is built on top of Kubernetes. This means:

  1. Unified Management: VMs and Containers are managed side-by-side using the same Kubernetes API.
  2. Rancher Integration: Seamlessly deploy Kubernetes clusters on top of Harvester VMs, managed centrally via Rancher.
  3. Cost Efficiency: Open-source and hardware-agnostic, reducing licensing costs compared to proprietary HCI solutions.

Integrating with AWS Hybrid Services ​

For organizations leveraging AWS, Harvester acts as the perfect on-premises counterpart.

AWS Outposts & EKS Anywhere ​

While AWS Outposts extends AWS infrastructure to your datacenter, it can be cost-prohibitive for smaller edge locations. Harvester can fill this gap by running EKS Anywhere clusters on bare metal or VMs. This allows you to maintain a consistent Kubernetes operational model across:

  • AWS Region: EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)
  • On-Premises Core: AWS Outposts
  • Edge Locations: Harvester running EKS Anywhere

Data Gravity and Latency ​

By deploying Harvester at the edge, you can process data locally before sending aggregated insights to AWS S3 or DynamoDB. This architecture minimizes latency for real-time applications (IoT, manufacturing) and reduces egress costs.

Architecture: The Edge-to-Cloud Continuum ​

  1. Edge: Harvester clusters running on commodity hardware, hosting local applications and data ingestion services.
  2. Core: A central Rancher management plane (potentially on AWS) orchestrating these edge clusters.
  3. Cloud: AWS services for long-term storage, analytics, and global distribution.

Conclusion ​

Harvester bridges the gap between traditional virtualization and modern cloud-native infrastructure. By adopting Harvester as part of a broader hybrid cloud strategy involving AWS, organizations can achieve the flexibility of the cloud with the performance and control of on-premises hardware. It empowers teams to build resilient, low-latency architectures that span from the edge to the cloud.