MultiCloud — It’s just the beginning
According to Research and Markets analysis, the MultiCloud market will grow to USD $44 billion by 2022.
Cloud Computing was invented to provide simplicity to the enterprises. Transfer the risks of procurement, maintenance, real estate, permits and operations to a third party and focus on business applications is all about Cloud.
Though MultiCloud provides superior benefits to enterprises, it adds complexity to their portfolio such as performance, agility, data sync across various cloud storage’s, compliance, skilled resources and cost. Therefore, Cloud especially MultiCloud is not simple.
451 Research says 69% of enterprises will have MultiCloud/Hybrid IT environments by 2019, but greater choice brings excessive complexity. As always, trends and patterns are emerging in MultiCloud arena. Not everyone fits the mold.
Agility
Enterprises must survive in the business world by coping with disruptive changes in technology. The technology change happens frequently these days after Digital adoption. The stake holders must be ready to adopt them in order to stay competitive implementing Agile processes.
Agility is applicable for independent consultants like me too. I successfully spent 10 years in IT knowing and practicing the application server WebLogic between 2000–2010. It started changing from fullstack adoption. I must upskill myself at least once in every 2 year time frame otherwise I become unmarketable.
The enterprise applications predominantly depend upon Java and .NET even today. They are monolithic, old and not flexible in Cloud environments. Though Cloud has agility, the applications don’t cooperate to achieve the KPI.
Microservices, Containers, Orchestration tools and DevOps processes enable enterprises to achieve agility for their applications at the MultiCloud environment.
Cloud work load model
It requires extensive planning, test and trial period to understand the various workloads. It is not advisable to have lower environments at AWS and Production at Azure. Though general opinion is that you don’t have to tax the Production Cloud by mixing the lower environment, technology differences between these two Cloud providers will increase your cost and frustrate IT resources.
Use one Cloud for a line of application environments. You may use different regions or availability zones for various right reasons. One should exercise caution when spread their application across regions.
We started using US East (Ohio) region to host Kuberiter SaaS application. Later a requirement came up to use WAF (Web Application Firewall) to restrict our services in some countries. It was found that our current region US East (Ohio) didn’t have WAF facility. We ended up migrating our virtual machines to US East (N. Virginia) to avail the services of WAF. It seems AWS implements all their new innovations at N. Virginia region first then propagate them to other regions. Since the project had a small number of virtual machines, it was easy for us to migrate them to US East (N. Virginia) region but I can’t imagine that type of migration for bigger projects that are highly integrated.
Availability zones may be used to segregate the environments to avoid expensive errors in provisioning, deployment and metering etc. One way or other, the complete work load planning falls under waterfall method.
Disaster Recovery
MultiCloud provides an effective strategy for enterprises to have Disaster Recovery practices. An enterprise can run their production application at AWS and maintain the similar, up to date replica of the application at Azure. By shutting down some replica services at Azure, there is good cost saving for the business from maintaining DR environment.
Data replication and consistency are the challenges in MultiCloud environment.
Active-Active MultiCloud Applications
As the opinion to use Active- Active MultiCloud to host an application is gaining momentum, It should be noted that though it may save your business from unexpected disruptions from one Cloud provider and security attacks, the cost to replicate the data and other adjudication processes can become very expensive.
Thousands of DevOps articles at Internet uphold the benefits of DevOps adoption however most of them don’t talk about data (including mine). Because data is unique to your organization and only you know how to work on it to provide 99.9% availability to the end users. The same is applicable to stateful applications, singleton services, rigid applications and on-premise integration.
A thorough Architecture plan, phased approach for Cloud migration and your due-diligence may help to achieve Active-Active MultiCloud standard for your applications. There is a long way to go.
Here Kubernetes Federated Cluster helps. The worker nodes can spread across multiple Clouds to serve the end users and the failure of one Cloud doesn’t affect the SLA’s.
Security
As long as you use one Cloud provider for your business, the security processes may be controlled and documented to some extent. The complexity arises when multiple Cloud providers enter your portfolio.
The term security involves security threats, user access, role based user access, authentication, identifying the end user device and ensure that the terminated employee lose access to those Cloud resources immediately.
The integration of AD, Okta, RSA etc. made things more complex in recent days and integrate the same with MultiCloud provider security architecture will be a daunting task. Due to the emergence of MultiCloud, security solutions will be developed rapidly to fill the vacuum.
Cost
Public Cloud providers offer cost effective resources such as virtual machines, storage and other network devices. Though it may look attractive to pursue, the real cost comes from usage (. i.e.) the network bandwidth. Network intensive Containers and Orchestration may skyrocket your cost like anything. The cautious attitude of your resources may let them to provision Cloud resources earlier than required will increase the cost too.
By implementing the right DevOps culture, monitoring strategies and plan the application release management usage proactively may save some cost.
Adopting MultiCloud with DevOps and Microservices is a challenging task for an enterprise. There are several pressure points to push the CIO’s to make decisions quickly. Please contact me if you have a need to assess your environment for MultiCloud/DevOps adoption.
Lawrence Manickam is the Technical Founder of Kuberiter Inc, a Seattle based Start-up that provide MultiCloud DevOps services (Jenkins as a Service, Docker as a Service and Kubernetes as a Service) for MultiCloud.
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