Multi-Cloud Architectures for the Enterprise: Part 1
These days, many enterprises are opting for a multi-cloud strategy. At my previous employer, I’d worked with AWS for 10 years, I’ve just recently moved into a new role with a Microsoft partner who naturally recommends Azure for a lot of workloads (even though AWS claim they are the better platform for Windows workloads) — I still love and prefer AWS.
For enterprises, running multiple workloads across different cloud providers may be for a number of reasons; some voluntary or to take advantage of a larger feature set, others because of legislated compliance or risk mitigation strategies. The workloads can be anything from internal systems to customer-facing digital products. So what can a multi-cloud architecture look like? I’m going to break this down into two different categories:
- Infrastructure Services: more traditional type services such as networking, compute, database.
- Platform services: services which can be consumed solely by APIs.
Services consumed by APIs are far easier to implement given you can integrate the SDK for these services almost anywhere. Infrastructure services are far more complex as you have to often consider the underlying networking layer to access and consume these services.
