Simplify Multi Cloud Complexities
The enterprise is moving quickly from a single-cloud deployment strategy to one that encompasses multiple clouds. Many organizations pursued a multi-cloud strategy because they were uncertain about cloud reliability. Multi-cloud strategy prevents data loss or downtime due to a localized component failure in the cloud. Also, avoiding vendor lock-in is an important factor for organizations to adopt multi-cloud environment.
A multi-cloud platform is a powerful environment, and it requires proper preparation because of its complex environment. With that, some of the helpful strategies which can help organization turn their attention away from infrastructure maintenance toward application performance.
Design your architecture
Despite the increasing number of organizations who are adopting Multi cloud strategy, one challenge is that many don’t understand how to truly architect (or re-factor) for resiliency. Many Cloud architects struggle when it comes to designing a multi cloud architecture in this type of endeavor because it requires expertise with more than cloud providers and migration process. Here are some simple multi cloud architecture designs of migration patterns for shifting to multi cloud.
You need to plan migration bases on architecturally significant, well-defined patterns. Below are the common objectives while designing your multi cloud architecture.
- Improve the user experience. Some applications vary in usage (e.g., used on weekends, but rarely on weekdays). They would benefit from the cloud-based increased responsiveness during peak times.
- Expand ways to access applications. Applications located in the public cloud are available over the Internet, but authentication concerns exist.
- An Application can be moved to a cloud and an on-premise datacenter without modification to application code or operations.
Connect Your Clouds
The Connection between multiple cloud providers must be well structured for below realistic and common use cases:
- Imagine a workflow automation that includes environment in which components split across clouds. Dev/test can be performed anywhere, but you may have higher requirements for staging/production.
- Ensure data backups for disaster recovery, avoidance and secure data replication for warehousing or distributed applications.
- Split application tiers into performance, security, sovereignty and scale that must be met in different geographies or optimized with split economics. Most cloud providers offer unique advantages that others can’t reproduce so it is advisable to split application because of functional requirements.
Such cloud interconnections demand higher security. Also, clouds simply require a secure connection to your organization’s users. Beyond security, unique routing and legacy layer-2 unicast or even multicast connectivity could be an application requirement. While there are third party tools available for security and networking, you can build your own virtualized and software-defined solutions that are compatible with any cloud infrastructure.
Importance of Multi cloud management and Orchestration
In multi cloud environment where your application is deployed across multiple locations, the monitoring, configuration and auto-response systems may get cumbersome unless you seek to elevate your orchestration across clouds. To address these challenges, you can use multi cloud management platforms or you can manage with your own centrally harmonized configurations and management as code.
Abstraction is another trend in provisioning models and APIs, which can be at many levels like an individual stack, multi-cloud orchestration, pipeline or application. By making your system more intuitive and concise for the cloud engineers and leaving the execution to automation by using Machine Learning, you are likely to improve the experience of your application users.
Analyze and Optimize Cloud Cost
Calculating total cloud cost in multi cloud environment is difficult because cloud providers have different pricing plans.
You will be charged a cost each time when data moves across the components of your application because it is deployed across different cloud providers.
To calculate costs accurately, you’ll need a very thorough handle on the workload that will be dedicated to each cloud provider, how data passes in and out of each provider’s components, and how all this might change over time. Also, you can reduce cloud cost by analyzing each cloud provider’s pricing structure and select the cheapest service according to your requirements.
Conclusion
It is clear that multi cloud strategy provides many critical advantages like vendor lock in and redundancy which can’t be possible with using single provider. But you may find that building and managing multi-cloud applications may be a greater burden to your development, DevOps, and security teams. But you can simplify multi cloud adoption by considering above strategies and leverage the benefits.
By Jignesh Solanki
