Multi Cloud Management System

Why Multi Cloud?

Multi-cloud strategy is the concomitant use of two or more cloud services to minimize the risk of widespread data loss or downtime due to a localized component failure in a cloud computing environment. Such a failure can occur in hardware, software, or infrastructure. A multi-cloud strategy can also improve overall enterprise performance by avoiding "vendor lock-in" and using different infrastructures to meet the needs of diverse partners and customers.

Reasons for an adverse cloud event can vary from a single cable connector failure to an EMP (electromagnetic pulse), or from a natural disaster to an act of cyberwarfare. Even the failure of a single hard disk/drive unit can result in a large-scale network outage if the malfunction takes place at a critical point in the system such as a host computer.

As customer bases and device types grow increasingly diverse (yet at the same time increasingly specialized), organizations face a complex array of challenges in their quest to satisfy the demands of all end users. In particular, the speed with which a given Website loads has a huge impact on customer satisfaction. Recent research has revealed that the average user expects a Webpage to load just as fast on a mobile device as it would on their home computer (two seconds or less). Because faster page loading results in more frequent and longer visits to a given Website, page loading time can indirectly affect rankings in search engines. A multi-cloud strategy can help an organization to minimize page loading times for all types of content.

A multi-cloud approach can offer not only the hardware, software and infrastructure redundancy necessary to optimize fault tolerance, but it can also steer traffic from different customer bases or partners through the fastest possible parts of the network. Some clouds are better suited than others for a particular task. For example, a certain cloud might handle large numbers of requests per unit time requiring small data transfers on the average, but a different cloud might perform better for smaller numbers of requests per unit time involving large data transfers on the average. Some organizations use a public cloud to make resources available to consumers over the Internet and a private cloud to provide hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. A third type of cloud, called a hybrid cloud, may also be used to manage miscellaneous internal and external services.

The concept of the public cloud has sparked a great deal of excitement and interest among IT executives.  Many are improving business agility and achieving superior results with cloud services. This, in turn, drives further investment in cloud.

Aside from the common expectations of agility and OpEx consumption pricing, some are drawn to the idea of expansive, highly centralised multi-cloud strategies. These executives envision managing multiple vendors with ease, orchestrating all processes efficiently and seamlessly moving workloads across different clouds. And of course, they can capitalize on every new feature and price drop along the way. Central to this panacea: a third party cloud management tool, with hooks into a variety of underlying cloud providers.

However, the true value of multi-cloud management is hard to quantify. Reality and expectations don’t always match up.

The perks of multi-cloud management

There are many benefits of multi-cloud management, especially for IT execs who need help managing basic infrastructure lifecycle tasks on various clouds. This allows users to reap the efficiency benefits of a third-party provider, while removing a lot of challenges associated with traditional infrastructure. Multi-cloud management integration can give customers access to a familiar interface, usually an on-premise virtualization tool, to access instantly scalable resources in the public cloud.

While this multi-cloud scenario is not necessarily a way to gain a competitive advantage from cloud, it can make the day-to-day lives of IT staff easier.

Challenges to multi-cloud management

However, reality often comes with a host of unexpected problems. Firstly, cloud interoperabilityis not a given and can be quite difficult to achieve. Workloads cannot simply be shifted from one place to another, even if the “ideal” of cloud suggests otherwise. From managing service provider APIs, to monitoring usage, and managing identity and access requirements, there are many challenges that IT executives face when trying to make multi-cloud management a reality for them.

Keeping up to date with innovation also takes time. New features from each cloud provider need to be integrated into the 3^rd party management tooling. By definition, the vendors will always be a few steps behind the latest features from each cloud provider. This results in a “lowest common denominator” UI where users typically end up only doing very basic VM operations across clouds. While this is perfectly functional, the element of competitive advantage – the whole point of cloud, and improved IT-business alignment – is notably lacking in this scenario.

Building an enterprise cloud strategy

Taking both the challenges and perks of multi-cloud management into consideration, being able to craft a practical enterprise cloud strategy remains a key concern for IT executives. Such strategies should not feature multi-cloud management focusing on portability at the infrastructure layer. Instead, leaders should focus on offering self-service and on-demand capabilities, under the backdrop of a management framework which still adheres to existing IT policies like governance, permissions, and billing transparency.

Portability is important. However, this should be a priority above the infrastructure layer, such as at the run-time, middleware, and application layers. This is where open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings and containers come in to play.

What makes PaaS and containers different than the multi-cloud management approach at the infrastructure layer?  Consider the following three benefits often associated with multi-cloud nirvana in comparison to leveraging PaaS or container technology instead:

• Freedom from lock-in (interoperability). With Cloud Foundry and Docker, there is broad capability to easily move apps around different infrastructure providers.  Both platforms are open-source to boot.  That means more options for the customer.
• Access to innovation. Both services, in part because of their open source nature, have thousands of contributors working on new capabilities all the time.
• Pricing arbitrage. This is still a false promise – after all, you don’t move to cloud only for cost savings.  But if you are not satisfied with a current vendor for whatever reason – service, reliability, shallow product portfolio or otherwise – PaaS and containers gives you a path to move workloads where they run best.