Hybrid cloud orchestration is the active management of cloud-aware applications across multiple content and hosting environments, including combinations of public and private resources. Unlike their traditional counterparts, cloud-aware applications can be optimized in real time to adapt to changes in usage, traffic, and resource contention. Such application architectures are self-healing in that they self-correct around network, bare-metal server, cloud, and platform outages.

To ensure that applications are self-healing in this manner requires traffic shaping across clouds, content delivery networks (CDNs), and private data centers. This type of traffic shaping requires a lot of monitoring. It can be tricky, but the benefit is a robust, redundant application with incredible fault tolerance and very long time between failures. Automated, real-time decisions need to be made with data representing the holistic health of your complete cloud and data center infrastructure. If done well, these architectural elements can also perform the dual purpose of making an application perform at its optimum performance potential.