Three must-haves for your multi-cloud architecture

Three Must-Haves For Your Multi-Cloud Architecture

Table of Contents
    Add a header to begin generating the table of contents

    Account, resource, and asset normalisation should all be handled from a central location, which should be on your pre-flight checklist.

    The world of most cloud architects is becoming increasingly diverse overnight. When there was only one public cloud provider to consider, things have changed. The patterns of architecture have shifted from being intra-cloud to being inter-cloud, in which complexity and risk are introduced.

    Therefore, architects like myself have developed procedures to cover most bases, much like a pilot would use a preflight checklist. Among these are cross-cloud governance, safety, operations, and so on. However, there are a few crucial factors that are frequently overlooked. Top three are as follows:

    User Account Management That Is Cross-Cloud And Centralised.

    Real success using multicoloured requires treating the collection of cloud service providers as though it were a single cloud. Adding, removing, and modifying user accounts should all be handled through a unified user management layer that can communicate with any cloud in its native language.

    Centralised account management simplifies user administration and boosts security by uniformly representing identities to all cloud service providers. Also, the reliability of identity control access systems will increase, and cloud security will grow more secure.

    Management Of Resources Across Clouds.

    Tools that keep tabs on how hard-to-track commodities like storage and computation are used fall into this category (including provisioning). The most vital feature is unattended de-provisioning, or returning the resource to a pool. The cloud service provider will no longer be charged for that particular service.

    Every month, somebody calls me in a panic because he assigned a lot of cloud resources but forgot to turn them off. The invoices are quite high, and getting cloud service providers to waive them is difficult, regardless of whether or not an error was made. It's more difficult to maintain order in a multicloud environment, and mistakes could be more expensive.

    Asset Normalisation.

    Suppose all of the clouds in your multi-cloud setup use the same brand of database. You're probably spending too much on licence fees, and having multiple clouds utilising the same set of resources will drive up the cost of running the business.

    Instead of putting all of their data eggs in one public cloud basket, many IT departments mistakenly believe that employing a single database in many clouds constitutes redundancy. In the event that your current cloud provider "goes bad," you may easily switch to employing the identical database on a different cloud.

    While all for minimising danger, it's unclear to me whether it's wise to use multiple cloud providers for mission-critical databases of the same technology & brand. There are alternative approaches that are just as safe, simpler, and cheaper to maintain. Just another item on the checklist for identifying superior approaches to the same old business challenges.

    Constructing a multi-cloud environment is challenging. We think that by studying the errors of others, we will make significant progress over the next few years. For the time being, let's try not to be the ones that mess up.

    The Multi-Cloud Challenge: Creating The Future Across The Board

    There is no longer any worry about the cloud. In its place, businesses are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies, with services like Amazon, Azure, Salesforce, and Slack all being used by a variety of departments. Hence, "multi-cloud" has emerged as a prefered phrase to describe the administration of not just public IaaS and SaaS clouds, and also private clouds comprised of virtualised on-premises resources.

    The cloud's low entry barrier has both a boon and a bane. Opening a cloud application and immediately having access to, or the capacity to construct, an application has enabled previously unimaginable levels of flexibility. Yet, this also facilitates easy independence among stakeholders, which can lead to inappropriate disregard for financial or safety concerns.

    The difficulty of governance in a multicloud environment has been around since the inception of information technology. For some, that's a terrible word since it smacks of such a bureaucracy and stands firmly in the path to getting things accomplished, as it is in: Fill out your application in triplicate, and you'll get a handful of cloud VMs throughout six weeks if you're fortunate. Few, though, would advocate for complete anarchy; after all, you wouldn't want developers to go crazy creating cloud applications on the a whim, especially if they were to make use of more expensive services, such as AI/ML, and actual customer data.

    Vice President of IT services at GM Financial Thomas Sweet coined the term "minimum viable governance" at a recent CIO Think Tank. Lightweight cloud "guardrails" to prevent duplicate work or inadequate cloud security are preferable to hammering people by prohibitions or complex approval processes. Developers or entrepreneurial LoB managers can experiment and innovate with these, as well as cost caps and a library of pre-approved cloud services.

    In particular, the three largest IaaS clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, & Microsoft Azure) offer fertile ground for innovation since they act as incubators for cutting-edge technologies like serverless computing and augmented reality/virtual reality app development platforms. Many businesses today employ two or more of the three major IaaS clouds, not just one, because each additional cloud provides something the others don't. Putting limits on such variety presents an interminable dilemma for policymakers.

    Nevertheless, this is the direction in which we are heading: a world in which we piece together thousands of cloud services and dozens of suppliers to create the apps that our business and our customers require. See how progressive businesses are achieving this aim and the lessons they've learned from these articles in InfoWorld, CIO, Online world, CSO, & Network World.

    Using OPA For Policy And Process Portability Across Multiple Clouds

    Because of the widespread adoption of multi-cloud solutions, businesses and development teams must now choose how to standardise their procedures across different types of clouds. The concept of multicloud is pervasive: 93% of cloud-based businesses employ multiple public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform, etc Microsoft Azure. In addition, 87 percent of those businesses employ a hybrid strategic plan, which involves a combination of public cloud or on cloud components.

    The primary reasons why businesses adopt cloud computing are to enhance the efficiency of their computing, storage, communication, and database operations while also reducing their overall costs. Then, businesses implement a multi-cloud approach to lessen their dependence on a single cloud provider.

    However, multicloud offers a second tempting possibility, an expansion of the original cloud-native logic, in that it allows cloud computing architectures to be abstracted in such a way that they can port instantly and seamlessly (if not even just quickly) with both cloud providers to optimise performance, accessibility, and cost savings (or at least retain uptime if one cloud provider goes down). Companies can get a taste of what it would be like to have this kind of inter portability with cloud applications like Kubernetes, which function identically regardless of whether they are deployed on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, a private cloud, or anywhere else.

    Multi-cloud portability is a beautiful concept in principle but a complex reality. True application & workload portability is a difficult road due to dependencies including vendor-specific functionality, APIs, and tough data lakes. Multi-cloud portability only fully functions, and performs well, when enterprises maintain uniformity in their various cloud deployments. To do so, they require a policy abstraction layer that is portable across different vendors, cloud, APIs, and so on, so that they can simply transfer knowledge, personnel, and procedures to their cloud-native operations. While it's possible that specific applications won't transfer over, a company's strategy as a whole should be able to.

    Using OPA To Create Standardised Policies And Processes Across Clouds

    Open Policy Agent is one of the most used technologies since it can be applied to any industry (OPA). OPA is an open attitude engine that Styra developed and gave to a Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It enables developer teams to create, scale, and enforce uniform, context-aware policy and authorisation across the cloud-native domain. OPA allows organisations to take a portable strategy for policy regulation across multi-cloud & hybrid cloud environments by letting teams write and implement rules across one of these number of environments, anywhere at number of enforcement points, including cloud infrastructure, Docker, microservices APIs, datasets, service meshes, application authorisation, and much more.

    Additionally, OPA is a policy-as-code tool that helps businesses turn the unstructured knowledge stored in company wikis and employees' heads into structured, machine-processable policy libraries. Companies can use policy as code to automatically enforce policy across many clouds, and they can go left to inject rules upstream, close to the development teams that are working across clouds, in order to detect and prevent security, operating, and compliance risk earlier.

    Using OPA In Conjunction With Terraform And Kubernetes

    Many programmers today use OPA together with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) instruments like Terraform and the Amazon Config and Deployment Kit (CDK). By using IaC tools, developers may make declarative modifications to their cloud infrastructure hosted by a vendor, outlining the ideal configuration of their system and having Terraform choose the best way to get there.

    To ensure that no misconfigurations or other issues are introduced into production, developers use OPA, a strategy tool, to design policies that verify Terraform's changes.

    In addition, OPA can authorise standard infrastructure updates without requiring human review process (and the potential for human error that comes with it). With this safeguard in place, developers may try out new settings without worrying about breaking anything. In spite of the fact that the cloud infrastructure cannot be moved across service providers, the method used is designed to be portable.

    Also, OPA is used by developers to manage, protect, and operationalize Kubernetes in a variety of cloud environments and with a wide range of Kubernetes releases. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for orchestrating containerised application deployment, scalability, and management. The OPA rules you deploy on top of Kubernetes are also portable.

    OPa can be applied to a wide variety of scenarios in Kubernetes. To guarantee that containers are launched properly, with the right settings and permissions, one common use case is to use OPA as both a Kubernetes admission controller. To prevent apps from hijacking one other's network traffic, developers can utilise OPA to manage Kubernetes entry and exit decisions. Maybe the most crucial aspect of the multi-cloud cloud is the ability to prove that every Kubernetes cluster, regardless of where it is deployed, complies with the enterprise's security standards.

    Developing Cloud-native Building Blocks

    Companies need to create typical building blocks to developers across any cloud-native environment before they can smoothly move apps across public clouds. With OPA, developers can easily write policy and automate that enforcement on security, compliance, & operations rules across the whole CI/CD pipeline. This facilitates rapid development with fewer human errors and allows multi-cloud deployments to scale reliably.

    As a result of OPA's support for policy as code, businesses can use services like Terraform for one‘s public clouds or OPA for strategy, Kubernetes for their container management but also OPA for policy, and a wide variety of microservices API but also app authorisation tools but instead OPA for policy, all while executing the very same OPA initiatives in their CI/CI pipelines or on their developers' personal laptops.

    In a nutshell, businesses may skip the time-consuming process of rewriting their software to run across many cloud platforms. In its place, they may concentrate on establishing a reusable procedure that makes use of shared competencies throughout the full cloud-native stack.

    Clouds Are No Longer Truly The Focus Of Multicloud.

    When most people hear the term "multicoloured," they picture an architecture that uses multiple public and/or cloud storage at once to facilitate top-tier cloud services. In other word, we utilise multicloud as a means to gain entry to the most suitable cloud services.

    As multicloud becomes the standard, We seen that the design and implementation of multi-cloud-based architectures are not about the clouds themselves. Several factors contribute to this:

    First, Multicloud Management Technology Should Exist Above And Apart From The Cloud-Native Resources It Manages.

    No matter is if tools are for AI operations, IAM, network monitoring, CMDBs, or metadata management, etc., they will be useful. Multicloud deployments benefit greatly from using cross-cloud technologies that are not tied to a single vendor's service model.

    The past popular approach was to employ cloud-native tools and technologies for each cloud service provider inside a multicloud configuration, however this suggests that your multicloud installation would have too many elements. The operational costs of managing a multi-cloud deployment of excessive complexity would be considerable if specialised tools are used for each cloud.

    Second, Providers Of Cloud Services Are Becoming Abstractable.

    Instead of learning and using the cloud-native interfaces of each provider in our multicloud, we can simply examine storage, databases, platforms, and security systems using standardised interfaces. This is a recent development that has only started to show promising results this year.

    The idea is that by using abstraction (for example, to remove the specifics of cloudops with AIops tools or to remove the specifics of security and development with develops tools), you can treat resources from multiple cloud providers as if they were the same, allowing you to take advantage of them across clouds. Multicloud is more accessible and useful because to a shared understanding of data storage, integration, and orchestration.

    The function of specific cloud service providers is less important than that of the programs, tools, and some other technologies that sit on top of cloud resources and make them usable by most businesses. That which is novel is when the concept of multicloud shifts from being solely concerned with clouds to also including the configuration of technologies into a multicloud solution.

    Conclusion

    Cloud architects have developed procedures to cover most bases, such as cross-cloud governance, safety, operations, and so on, but there are a few crucial factors that are often overlooked. These include user account management that is cross-Cloud and centralised, management of resources across clouds, unattended de-provisioning, and asset normalisation. Additionally, IT departments may mistakenly believe that employing a single database in many clouds constitutes redundancy, but this is not the case. The Multi-Cloud Challenge is a challenge for businesses to create the future across the board, with services like Amazon, Azure, Salesforce, and Slack all being used by a variety of departments. The cloud's low entry barrier has enabled previously unimaginable levels of flexibility, but it also facilitates easy independence among stakeholders, which can lead to inappropriate disregard for financial or safety concerns.

    To address this, Vice President of IT services at GM Financial Thomas Sweet coined the term "minimum viable governance". Lightweight cloud "guardrails" to prevent duplicate work or inadequate cloud security are preferable to hammering people by prohibitions or complex approval processes. The three largest IaaS clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, & Microsoft Azure) offer fertile ground for innovation, leading to the adoption of multi-cloud solutions. 93% of cloud-based businesses employ multiple public cloud services, and 87% of those businesses employ a hybrid strategic plan. Multicloud is an expansion of the original cloud-native logic, allowing cloud computing architectures to be abstracted in such a way that they can port instantly and seamlessly with both cloud providers to optimise performance, accessibility, and cost savings.

    Companies can get a taste of this kind of inter portability with cloud applications like Kubernetes. Multi-cloud portability is a difficult concept due to dependencies on vendor-specific functionality, APIs, and data lakes. Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open attitude engine that Styra developed and gave to a Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It enables developer teams to create, scale, and enforce uniform, context-aware policy and authorisation across the cloud-native domain. OPA is a policy-as-code tool that helps businesses turn unstructured knowledge stored in company wikis and employees' heads into structured, machine-processable policy libraries.

    In conjunction with Terraform and Kubernetes, developers use OPA to design policies that ensure no misconfigurations or other issues are introduced into production. OPA is a tool used by developers to authorise standard infrastructure updates without requiring human review. It is also used to manage, protect, and operationalize Kubernetes in a variety of cloud environments and with a wide range of releases. OPA can be applied to a wide variety of scenarios, such as to guarantee containers are launched properly with the right settings and permissions, to prevent apps from hijacking one other's network traffic, and to prove that every cluster complies with the enterprise's security standards. This facilitates rapid development with fewer human errors and allows multi-cloud deployments to scale reliably.

    Companies may skip the time-consuming process of rewriting their software to run across many cloud platforms and focus on establishing a reusable procedure that makes use of shared competencies throughout the full cloud-native stack. Multicloud is an architecture that uses multiple public and/or cloud storage at once to facilitate top-tier cloud services. It benefits from using cross-cloud technologies that are not tied to a single vendor's service model. The concept of multicloud shifts from being solely concerned with clouds to also including the configuration of technologies into a multicloud solution. This is due to two factors: first, Multicloud Management Technology should exist above and apart from the Cloud-Native Resources it Manages, and second, providers of Cloud Services are becoming abstractable. This allows users to treat resources from multiple cloud providers as if they were the same, allowing them to take advantage of them across clouds.

    Content Summary

    • Account, resource, and asset normalisation should all be handled from a central location, which should be on your pre-flight checklist.
    • Among these are cross-cloud governance, safety, operations, and so on.
    • However, there are a few crucial factors that are frequently overlooked.
    • Adding, removing, and modifying user accounts should all be handled through a unified user management layer that can communicate with any cloud in its native language.
    • Centralised account management simplifies user administration and boosts security by uniformly representing identities to all cloud service providers.
    • While all for minimising danger, it's unclear to me whether it's wise to use multiple cloud providers for mission-critical databases of the same technology & brand.
    • There are alternative approaches that are just as safe, simpler, and cheaper to maintain.
    • The difficulty of governance in a multicloud environment has been around since the inception of information technology.
    • In particular, the three largest IaaS clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, & Microsoft Azure) offer fertile ground for innovation since they act as incubators for cutting-edge technologies like serverless computing and augmented reality/virtual reality app development platforms.
    • Many businesses today employ two or more of the three major IaaS clouds, not just one, because each additional cloud provides something the others don't.
    • Putting limits on such variety presents an interminable dilemma for policymakers.
    • Nevertheless, this is the direction in which we are heading: a world in which we piece together thousands of cloud services and dozens of suppliers to create the apps that our business and our customers require.
    • Because of the widespread adoption of multi-cloud solutions, businesses and development teams must now choose how to standardise their procedures across different types of clouds.
    • The concept of multicloud is pervasive: 93% of cloud-based businesses employ multiple public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform, etc Microsoft Azure.
    • Then, businesses implement a multi-cloud approach to lessen their dependence on a single cloud provider.
    • However, multicloud offers a second tempting possibility, an expansion of the original cloud-native logic, in that it allows cloud computing architectures to be abstracted in such a way that they can port instantly and seamlessly (if not even just quickly) with both cloud providers to optimise performance, accessibility, and cost savings (or at least retain uptime if one cloud provider goes down).
    • Multi-cloud portability only fully functions, and performs well, when enterprises maintain uniformity in their various cloud deployments.
    • To do so, they require a policy abstraction layer that is portable across different vendors, cloud, APIs, and so on, so that they can simply transfer knowledge, personnel, and procedures to their cloud-native operations.
    • Using OPA To Create Standardised Policies And Processes Across CloudsOpen Policy Agent is one of the most used technologies since it can be applied to any industry (OPA).
    • It enables developer teams to create, scale, and enforce uniform, context-aware policy and authorisation across the cloud-native domain.
    • OPA allows organisations to take a portable strategy for policy regulation across multi-cloud & hybrid cloud environments by letting teams write and implement rules across one of these number of environments, anywhere at number of enforcement points, including cloud infrastructure, Docker, microservices APIs, datasets, service meshes, application authorisation, and much more.
    • Additionally, OPA is a policy-as-code tool that helps businesses turn the unstructured knowledge stored in company wikis and employees' heads into structured, machine-processable policy libraries.
    • Companies can use policy as code to automatically enforce policy across many clouds, and they can go left to inject rules upstream, close to the development teams that are working across clouds, in order to detect and prevent security, operating, and compliance risk earlier.
    • Many programmers today use OPA together with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) instruments like Terraform and the Amazon Config and Deployment Kit (CDK).
    • In spite of the fact that the cloud infrastructure cannot be moved across service providers, the method used is designed to be portable.
    • Also, OPA is used by developers to manage, protect, and operationalize Kubernetes in a variety of cloud environments and with a wide range of Kubernetes releases.
    • The OPA rules you deploy on top of Kubernetes are also portable.
    • Maybe the most crucial aspect of the multi-cloud cloud is the ability to prove that every Kubernetes cluster, regardless of where it is deployed, complies with the enterprise's security standards.
    • With OPA, developers can easily write policy and automate that enforcement on security, compliance, & operations rules across the whole CI/CD pipeline.
    • This facilitates rapid development with fewer human errors and allows multi-cloud deployments to scale reliably.
    • As a result of OPA's support for policy as code, businesses can use services like Terraform for one's public clouds or OPA for strategy, Kubernetes for their container management but also OPA for policy, and a wide variety of microservices API but also app authorisation tools but instead OPA for policy, all while executing the very same OPA initiatives in their CI/CI pipelines or on their developers' personal laptops.
    • The past popular approach was to employ cloud-native tools and technologies for each cloud service provider inside a multicloud configuration, however this suggests that your multicloud installation would have too many elements.
    • That which is novel is when the concept of multicloud shifts from being solely concerned with clouds to also including the configuration of technologies into a multicloud solution.

    FAQs About Multi-Cloud Architecture

    A multi-cloud strategy is an approach that operates any combination of private, public and hybrid clouds. Therefore, an organisation may have multiple public and private clouds, or multiple hybrid clouds, all either connected or not.

    A multi-cloud architecture is one that includes two or more clouds of the same type. Some organizations use multiple private clouds to deliver services, while others use multiple public clouds from different vendors – these are both examples of multi-cloud architectures.

    A multi-cloud strategy gives companies the freedom to use the best possible cloud for each workload. In contrast, single-cloud stacks impose a significant cost. Where there could be greater power drawn from the unique capabilities of every cloud, there is higher complexity and the limitation of proprietary systems.

    A great cloud architect launches services in the cloud.

    You have removed the need to manage hardware, but replication, high availability, patching the operating system, managing installed applications, and the data itself all remain under your umbrella of administration.

    Multicloud computing, as this word suggests, is the use of multiple public cloud services from different vendors within one architecture at the same time. For instance, a business might use AWS for data storage, Google Cloud Platform for development and testing, and yet Microsoft Azure for disaster recovery.

    Scroll to Top