Multi-Cloud: Necessity or Luxury?
“Multi-Cloud” sounds like something unfamiliar to you?
If so, let me explain what is “Multi-Cloud” in simpler terms:
First what exactly is Cloud or Cloud Computing?
“Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider” — Amazon Web Services (AWS)
“Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services — including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence — over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change.” — Microsoft
“Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources as services over the internet. It eliminates the need for enterprises to procure, configure, or manage resources themselves, and they only pay for what they use.” — Google
In short, we can say: Cloud Computing is on-demand usage of someone else’s computing resources/services for a fee i.e pay as you go model.
Now, What is “Multi-Cloud”?
Multi-Cloud (aka Multi-Cloud Computing) is the use of multiple (i.e. 2 or more ) Cloud Computing Services platforms/providers instead of depending on only one Cloud Service Provider.
Currently, in the market three Cloud services provider are considered to be the best cloud service providers i.e. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The moment we say we want to multi-cloud, that would mean using any 2 or all of the above cloud service providers. There are other cloud services providers but not even near to the above three!
Reasons we need Multi-Cloud (or we can say the benefits of Multi-Cloud):
1) Avoid Downtime:
Any Cloud Service provider can go down at any moment in time as no cloud guarantees 100% uptime and nobody even can!
Outages are very bad for business, cost clients, money, and of course goodwill.
But the chance of all cloud services going down at the same time is unprecedented and never seen before!
So, we can take benefit from this, the fact that chances of all cloud services going down is very very less, we can host applications span over multiple clouds can save us from incidents like unavailable downtime if we depend on only one cloud service.
2) Competetive Advantages:
All cloud services prices for individual services are different, if go multi-cloud, we can take advantage of these pricing differences and use services of lower cost to achieve cost-efficiency.
Not just that, all cloud gives millions of credits to the clients, if go multi-cloud, we can take advantage of that and host applications and use services of all the cloud services providers who give the credits to save the cost and invest the saving in rapid growth requirements.
3) Reduce Vendor lock-in:
Vendor lock-in is an age-old issue, even if every cloud service provider claims they are not doing it, but still directly / indirectly they are doing it.
Developing an application cloud-native way such as using containerization and Kubernetes to host it and control the application environment, we can host the application on any cloud, that reduce the vendor lock-in issue. A point to note, multi-cloud Kubernetes deployment is very popular these days!
4) Increased Scalability:
If working with an enterprise / large application where traffic is very high, you must have faced an issue at least once like not enough resources available at that particular moment in time to handle the extra spike, with no option you have redirect traffic to another region which costed extra latency, this can be solved via multi-cloud strategy, if one region in any cloud has no more resources to spare, we can utilize the same region of different cloud to compensate for that.
5) Store back-up:
In some cases, for very very important files, we want to make sure the data never get lost and if possible we want to be 1000% sure that the data should not be lost n matter what, in such cases, we can store data as back-up to multiple cloud services storage options, it’s ZERO chance that all backup can be removed/deleted for any incident.
Challenges:
1) Complexity:
Each cloud service has its level of complexity for solution designing and implementation, multi-cloud take that to just another level. Using different tools/services in different cloud services and working with them all together is indeed a matter of concern.
A lot of solutions design thinking and expert opinion needed to create the Multi-cloud strategy, maintain and improve it further, indeed a very challenging task, and the resulted solution is also a complex one.
2) Security concern:
Each cloud has its own bugs/loopholes/drawbacks, no cloud can claim 100% security, using multi-cloud means now you have an even larger attack surface. While designing a Multi-cloud strategy, the security part needs dedicated attention and efficient design and implementation in place to handle/prevent the possible security issues.
3) Hard to find skilled resources:
Muli-cloud skilled talents/resources are hard to find and retain. Due to the scarcity of human resources, it’s needed to train existing employees on muli-cloud and it takes a lot of time.
Why not Hybrid Cloud?
A Hybrid cloud is just a subset of Multi-cloud, in multi-cloud, we use multiple cloud service providers, for Hybrid cloud we utilize On-premises / private cloud with Public Cloud Services, in terms of Scalability and cost savings, having a multi-cloud strategy with Public cloud gives proved to be a much better solution.
Now, let’s go back to the main question or topic of this article: Is Multi-Cloud is Necessity of Luxury?
My opinion is, for enterprise applications where need huge computing resources and handle huge traffic, it’s better to utilize a multi-cloud solution strategy rather than depending on a single cloud service provider, they can train or hire resources to plan, develop and maintain the multi-cloud solutions, it’s a necessity for them.
For smaller or medium companies, which handle significantly less workload/traffic and demand less computing resources, they can depend on a single cloud service provider with a strategy like Multi-region failover or Hybrid Cloud Strategy to handle the outages. Going after Multi-cloud could be a luxury for them, but if they see stiff growth and have resources such a funs and human resources, it’s a necessity for them.
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About the Author:
Sandip Das works as a Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect & DevOps Engineer for multiple tech product companies/start-ups, also holding the title of “AWS Container Hero”.
He is always in “keep on learning” mode, enjoys sharing knowledge with others, and currently holds 6 AWS Certifications. Sandip finds blogging as a great way to share knowledge: he writes articles on Linkedin about Cloud, DevOps, Programming, and more. He also creates video tutorials on his YouTube channel.
