Recommendations for a Successful Multi-cloud Adoption for Containers, VMs and Kubernetes Workloads

As organizations continue their digital transformation journeys, modernizing business processes and optimizing IT infrastructures, it’s clear that cloud computing, along with automation and orchestration, are becoming increasingly important. When considering a move to the cloud, it might be tempting to pick a single provider. But digital transformation services aren’t one-size-fits-all. In fact, there are many reasons why digital transformation requires organizations to make use of cloud services from multiple providers and avoid being locked into a single provider. 

The days of single public cloud deployments are gone. According to Gartner, multi-cloud strategies will reduce vendor dependency for two-thirds of organizations by 2024. The use of multiple clouds is by far the most common pattern among enterprises, with 92% (82% hybrid cloud and 10% multiple public cloud) adopting this strategy in Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report. Increased cost saving and price flexibility, risk mitigation, enhanced security and service availability, unlimited scalability, better agility, and the promise of each provider’s best solutions are all too great to ignore. 

The truth is that managing and supporting multi-cloud is not an easy task. In an ideal world, application workloads—whatever their heritage—should be able to move seamlessly between (or be shared among) cloud service providers and to be deployed wherever the optimal combination of performance, functionality, cost, security, compliance, availability, and resilience is to be found—while avoiding the dreaded ‘vendor lock-in’. 

We recommend shaping your digital strategy with these key principles for making multi-cloud adoption a success:

1. Avoid Multi-Cloud through Hyperscalers (e.g. AWS ECS Anywhere, Google Anthos), they do not avoid the pitfalls of single-vendor reliance and can be very expensive in the long run.   

2. Avoid Proprietary-source Solutions by major vendors (e.g. Nutanix, VMware), they have predatory pricing and licensing models, are complex and expensive to deploy and maintain, and usually require the user to manually migrate or rebuild workloads. 

3. Adopt True Multi-Cloud based on Interoperability, to manage your workload across every cloud from a single pane of glass, Portability, to execute your workloads with the same images and templates on any infrastructure and move them across clouds and on-premises infrastructure, enhanced Security, to use dedicated, isolated resources with improved security, privacy, and control, and expanded service Availability, to execute your applications to meet the quality of service requirements. 

4. Not All Workloads Are Heading to the Cloud, there’s still a place for the edge or core on-premise data center to host workloads and improve cost, control, security, and performance. 

In the 2020 edition of the Forrester/IBM report, The Key To Enterprise Hybrid Multicloud Strategy, a survey of 350 global enterprise IT decision-makers found that more than half of mission-critical workloads and 47% of data-intensive workloads will still be run either on-premises or on an internal private cloud in two years. 

5. Be Ready and Think about Cloud Repatriation Upfront by applying a vendor-neutral approach from the very beginning. 

A recent study by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has found that the cloud accounted for 50% of the cost of goods sold (COGS) in the top 50 public Software-as-a-Service companies—and with the number of public software companies growing, the problem adds up to $100 billion in market value. Cloud expenses are not really OpEx because many large companies end up having to accept spending commitments with the provider. For example, Snap said in 2017 that it had committed to spending $2 billion over five years on Google and $1 billion over five years on AWS. Other studies demonstrate that overprovisioning and always-on resources will lead to $26.6 billion in public cloud waste in 2021, not to mention energy waste…

6. Automate Deployment and Operations at Cloud and Edge Locations to fit the needs of heterogeneous environments, the nature of the workloads, and development workflows.  

Streamline Your Operations with an Open Source Multi-Cloud Platform

You must find ways to simplify your cloud operations. With each provider you add to your multi-cloud environment, the management and operational complexity increases exponentially. Multi-cloud is familiar to many companies who have implemented their private cloud infrastructure with OpenNebula and now effectively operate their workloads in multi-cloud environments fully based on open source software. OpenNebula brings a vendor-neutral platform to orchestrate the datacenter-cloud-edge continuum that provides unified management of IT infrastructure and applications, avoiding vendor lock-in and reducing complexity, resource consumption, and operational costs.

OpenNebula is fully open-source software. We invite you to try it out and in only 5 minutes deploy a real multi-cloud on a combination of your favorite cloud providers for your VMs, containers or Kubernetes clusters.

This post is an excerpt of OpenNebula’s blog article Key Design Principles for Digital Transformation through Multi-Cloud.