Multi-Cloud: starting a complex but attractive transformation
1.Planning experience
As always, this is the most important and not that easy part of the journey. All should start with a clear understanding of priorities and limitations in organizational IT strategy. It could be a combination of diversification to reduce risks and costs, innovations, a variety of IT services, regulatory compliance, in-house IT experience, partnership agreements, or something else. Anyway, all this context should be clear for an architect whose work is to design a flexible solution that will not just bring more complexity and headaches to his organization.
Firstly, compare the most prominent pros and cons of Multi-Cloud based on the dynamic character of the workload moving among different service providers. None of them should escape consideration.
Secondly, take a look at some advises sometimes based on a sad but valuable experience
a. Think beyond your favorite provider preference
Many enterprise IT departments now have well-established relationships with one or more cloud service providers. Because of this, comfort levels and opinions of the various providers have formed. Most have indeed chosen which providers they are likely to work with today and into the future. This cloud provider preference information is typically included in a standard, multi-year IT roadmaps. However, a simple blurb about cloud provider preferences should not be misconstrued as being a "strategy" as it relates to multi-cloud. While choosing cloud providers is a good initial step, more detail is required.
b. Analyze your in-house multi-cloud expertise
When the number of private and public cloud providers escalates as it likely will in a multi-cloud environment, IT leaders must consider how they plan to obtain and maintain in-house expertise. Depending on your current and future cloud plans, you may opt to train cloud administrators as generalists that can be proficient in working in any cloud environment the business selects.
However, a tipping point will inevitably be reached as the number of cloud providers grows. That's when it may make more sense to have certain administrators specialize in only a handful of cloud providers or specific cloud skills. Planning to identify this tipping point for your business is crucial - especially if multi-cloud takes off faster than anticipated.
c. Organize your applications
Applications, platforms, and data operate differently depending on which public or private cloud they run in. Cost savings, performance, and redundancy must all be considered when planning where to spin up cloud services - and where to store massive amounts of data. Other factors, such as the cost of exporting data from the cloud, the level of elasticity required for specific apps and data, as well as what types of SLAs are needed, will also play heavily into this decision-making process. In terms of a strategy, it's best to be able to categorize various applications and data into groups as opposed to having to perform in-depth evaluations every time a new app or database project formalizes. That way, the decision time is shortened to avoid delays in the rollout.
d. Examine scalability and security
While cloud scalability and security are vastly different topics from a technical sense, they must be discussed in tandem when looking at a multi-cloud strategy. Likely, your cloud providers are not 100% compatible in terms of the setup and configuration of underlying infrastructure components for both the networking and security components. Thus, your multi-cloud strategy should detail how scalability and security will be initially set up and maintained.
Some organizations opt for manual processes that require internal IT staff to duplicate networking and security across multiple cloud instances. Others will look to multi-cloud management platforms to help automate these processes. Either way, some serious thought must be put into this category to make sure that a planned multi-cloud network is both easily scaled and secure when managed by both GUI and API interfaces.
2.Building experience
Do you know how Netflix manages such a massive collection of videos and provides an exceptional streaming experience without disruptions? The reason is in multi-data centers located geographically around the world, which backups each other in case of any disaster. Also, streaming from a local datacenter gives a faster viewing experience.
Building HA and DR architecture, consider using different cloud providers for Primary, Secondary, and backup sites. A second cloud service provider could be used to provide business continuity for a primary cloud provider if the same server templates and scripts could be used to configure and launch resources into either provider. Factors to be considered when using this option include public versus private IP addresses and provider service level agreements. If there is a problem or failure requires switching clouds, a multi-cloud architecture would make this a relatively easy migration.
Going further, an organization can automate resource provisioning by the implementation of a Single Cloud Portal with cloud ‘marketplace’ for internal users and resources governance engine for the IT department. Policies based on utilization, pricing, regulatory compliance, and business rules will reduce risks and help to govern multi-cloud efficiently.
3.Using experience
A Multi-Cloud strategy has many advantages, but it undoubtedly adds an extra layer of management complexity - especially if it is developed in an ad hoc manner rather than being planned from the ground up. In the Forrester/Virtustream survey, there is a roughly equal split on the issue:
Given the level of ad hoc adoption, it's no surprise to find that respondents favored cloud providers offering add-ons such as cloud strategy service, deployment, migration, and management capabilities.
Whether an organization relies a lot on a vendor advises or not, there are several topics where should be a crystal clear view with well monitored and regularly revisited statuses cause the situation in Multi-Cloud is very dynamic:
- Data security maintenance
- Complying with data regulations
- Workloads migration to the cloud and between clouds
- Cloud workloads optimization
- Multiple cloud solution management and modernization
- Cloud budget management
4.Conclusion
Multi-cloud offers businesses the ability to step outside a traditional compute framework with its frequently inefficient legacy approaches or even single cloud usage with a chosen vendor lock-in. Maximizing the impact of multi-cloud, however, means tackling the challenges of app sprawl, unique portals, compliance, migration, and security head-on. The main goal multi-cloud approach is to use as many clouds as per requirements to address the limitations of using one cloud from a single provider. Though toggling between cloud providers to perform tasks can be complicated, especially right out of the gate, cloud service providers are working to make toggling between clouds increasingly efficient. The more useful it becomes, the more multi-cloud computing will evolve.
