With the rapid evolution of cloud technologies, a well-known financial institution is also interested in possibly integrating cloud technology into their existing on-premises Red Hat OpenShift container infrastructure. The goal of this bachelor thesis, therefore, was to develop a hybrid container strategy. The strategy delivers the capture of the existing on-premises container infrastructure, requirements engineering, the analysis of cloud container platform solutions, the development of a CI/CD Pipeline, a workload strategy, cost analysis, platform comparison, and a final proposed solution.

Understanding the existing container infrastructure and cloud requirements was very important to deliver the hybrid container strategy. Besides conducting interviews, a basic knowledge of container technologies, Kubernetes, and further infrastructure as code concepts needed to be built. Furthermore, much literature research was required to understand the architecture and features of the analyzed container platforms and CI/CD Pipeline solutions. Finally, the container platforms were tested in Microsoft Azure, and cost functions with parameters were developed.

This bachelor thesis results in a hybrid container strategy that analyses the selected cloud container platform solutions' monitoring, logging, security, container registry, and CI/CD features. Furthermore, a hybrid CI/CD Pipeline with a GitHub Actions CI Pipeline prototype was developed, including an example application for demonstration. The strategy also consists of a workload strategy that defines the allocated resources in the cloud and the potential applications that cause the cloud container workload. The strategy furthermore discovers the estimated costs caused by the analyzed container platforms. The functions developed for the cost analysis could be reused later with different parameters to create additional cost estimations. Finally, the strategy combines the analyzed container platform components and proposes a final architecture containing a selection of components which consider the existing on-premises infrastructure and future requirements of the client.