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Cloud on-ramps and hybrid cloud, explained
Platform and infrastructure teams · 8 min read
Hybrid is not a halfway house. Most mature setups deliberately keep some things in the public cloud and run the rest closer to home, connected by a private link. A cloud on-ramp is that link, done properly — and it is what makes hybrid a stable operating model rather than a migration in progress.
What a cloud on-ramp is
An on-ramp is a private, direct connection between your infrastructure and the clouds you use — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and our own sovereign cloud — instead of routing over the open internet. Your traffic travels a predictable path with predictable latency, and never touches the public internet on the way.
| Path | Latency | Predictability | Exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public internet (VPN over it) | Variable, route-dependent | Low (best-effort) | Traverses the open internet |
| Cloud on-ramp (private interconnect) | Low and consistent | High (engineered path) | Stays on private links |
The patterns it enables
Teams reach for an on-ramp to solve specific problems, not for its own sake. The common patterns:
- Data gravity: keep large or regulated datasets local, and let cloud services reach them over the private link rather than copying everything up.
- Steady-state hybrid: run your heavy, predictable compute on local bare metal, and keep the managed cloud services you depend on — connected, not duplicated.
- Disaster recovery: use the cloud as a recovery target (or the reverse) with a reliable private path between the two sides.
- Migration bridge: move workloads in stages while both environments run side by side, with a private link holding them together.
When hybrid is the right answer
Keep the managed services you genuinely depend on in the cloud, but run your data, your steady compute, and anything latency- or sovereignty-sensitive locally. You get the cloud’s convenience where it helps and local control where it matters, without committing to one model forever.
Technical detail
A private interconnect avoids public-internet jitter and exposure, and keeps data-transfer performance predictable. At Metal on Cloud the on-ramp runs from our own network (AS203905), multi-homed and IX-peered in Nairobi, so your bare metal or colocation connects to the major public clouds and our own sovereign cloud over a low-latency private path you can actually reason about and engineer around.
Key takeaway
You do not have to repatriate everything to benefit from local infrastructure. An on-ramp lets you move the parts that should be local while keeping the rest exactly where it is — and run that way indefinitely, not just during a migration.
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