Multi-Cloud Architecture and its challenges

Almost all enterprises nowadays are looking forward to multi-cloud architecture. No longer are IT organizations constricted down to merely managing data-centers, a few hosted and managed service providers. Hence the needy line-of-business teams have landed with SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS cloud services to overcome resource constraints, guiding many enterprises IT structures towards multi-clouds.

In the IT industry, the tools and technologies needed to craft and manage hybrid multi-cloud architecture are fragmented. Thanks to Multi-cloud and Hybrid cloud, they carry workload and infrastructure challenges hand-in-hand, that drives the development of new cloud management technology.

Not only resource utilization needs to be managed, performance and costs of various public and private cloud services, cloud management platforms are needed to be aware of the integrations and processes that transcend on-premises and cloud execution venues. Also in some ways interoperability is required with the new multi-purpose hybrid iPaaS that connects them, to assure business continuity.

Challenges:-

When migration to hybrid-cloud turns unavoidable for organizations from their on-premise systems, they need solutions for the following challenges and requirements:-

1. For users located far and wide, distributed geographically where they are surrounded by multiple data centers instead of a single data center.
2. For an environment where public clouds are used with on-premises resources.
3. For a non-resilient cloud-based application, which can affect disaster recovery if there is a loss of a single data center.

According to the above challenges, two hybrid multi-cloud architectures for migrating on-premise environment to a hybrid multi-cloud environment have been introduced. There are many multi-cloud architectures, namely re-deployment, cloudification, relocation, refactoring, rebinding, replacement, and modernization for organizations to for adopt multi-cloud environments.

1.Multi-Application Rebinding

In the above hybrid multi-cloud architecture, a re-architected application is deployed partially on multiple cloud environments. This architecture can be used for the systems that route users to the nearest data center when the primary or on-premise data center fails. In particular, they can be configured to monitor the status of the service to which they are directing the users. If any service is not available, all the traffic will be routed to another healthy instance. This architecture uses an on-premise cloud adapter (e.g., service bus or elastic load balancer) to provide an integration of components in different cloud platforms.

Let’s understand with an example. Here, App1 and App2 are two application components hosted on-premise before migration. As both the components are independent integrity units, App1 remains on-premise while two App2’s are deployed on AWS and Azure for disaster recovery. App1 and two App2 components are connected via EBS or service bus.

The main benefits of using this architecture are the application’s response rate increases to the maximum level and unhealthy services become healthy again.

2. Multi-Application Modernization

In this architecture, on-premise applications are re-architected as a portfolio and deployed in the cloud environment.

In the above example, App1, App2, and one application component, Custom APP, are re-architected as a portfolio and deployed on different cloud providers and on-premise. A custom APP is deployed on AWS and App2 is deployed on Azure while App1 is kept on-premise.

This architecture overcomes the problem where re-architecting an on-premise application does not remove duplicated functionality and inconsistencies. Multi-Application Modernization analyzes an application as a portfolio to identify opportunities for consolidation and sharing. The separation of workloads enables the identification of components that are shared by more than one solution. This architecture provides a consistent performance and reduces operational tasks and maintenance costs for shared components.