What is Multi Cloud
According to Wikipedia, Multi-cloud is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single heterogenous architecture. What is you would like to store your data in AWS S3 buckets but you want to use machine learning services provided by GCP for your enterprise software ? Multi-cloud comes to the rescue for all such scenarios.
Today many enterprise organizations have already adopted the multi-cloud strategy i.e. they use more than one private cloud or public cloud. If the company has more than one private cloud or using multiple public clouds, you can say that the company is operating on a multi-cloud architecture. As per a study conducted by RightScale, 81% of enterprises are using multi-cloud strategy in their day to day operations.
Difference between Hybrid Cloud and Multi-cloud
Both the terms are very similar in the context that they are used for specifying an architecture environment where more than one cloud is being used. However, a hybrid cloud is a combination of a public cloud and a private cloud whereas a multi-cloud can be any combination of public clouds or private clouds. You can consider hybrid cloud as a specific subset of multi-cloud.
One another significant difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategy is that the components of hybrid cloud usually work together to achieve a single purpose whereas in multi-cloud, different clouds are generally used for different purposes.You can say that in a hybrid cloud environment, storage, data and other processes interact and intersect to achieve a single goal and in a multi-cloud environment, storage, data etc remains in their own cloud.
Lets take a more practical example to differentiate, an application running in a hybrid cloud environment can use analytics, load balancers and app services from Azure cloud whereas to keep their data secure, they store all their data in their private cloud. The compute resources works same in both the clouds and can transfer loads to optimize the traffic management and the cost. Now, in the multi-cloud environment, a particular cloud provider will be running a specific set of services. For example, the application might use all the compute and network services from AWS and the database and storage services of IBM cloud. Some parts of the application are using resources only from AWS and some parts are using services of IBM cloud.
Advantages of Multi-Cloud
- Avoiding Vendor lock-in : A multi-cloud approach helps you eliminating dependency on a single cloud provider.
- Reduce Cost : Since multiple vendors are involved, a well planned multi-cloud strategy can reduce cost from all the vendors.
- Increased Reliability : Since the multi-cloud strategy eliminates the single point of failure, thus increasing the reliability.
- Increased Flexibility : It enables you to get best of all the cloud providers and thus empowers companies to realize the full promise of the cloud.
Disadvantages of Multi-Cloud
- Increased complexity : As the number of cloud providers increases, the more complex it becomes to manage all the clouds.
- Increased cost : If the strategy is not planned well, it might lead to more cost and could affect business agility.
- Security : By using more than one cloud provider, the line of control runs across more than a single cloud provider, thus it requires a much robust monitoring and security approach.
In the current world of cloud computing, I think all the enterprises would eventually take the multi-cloud path to rule out the competitors even though a good investment is required to kick off the multi-cloud strategy. In this competitive tech industry, innovation is the key and the flexibility offered by the multi-cloud strategy is surely the way to innovation.