Multicloud - Part 1

" Multicloud is not a black or white choice or a universal architecture. "

One of the solutions to preventing malicious and insider threats when using it in a hybrid cloud as a strategy is to use the multicloud architecture, which may be suitable for some organizations, especially if your application is designed for business. microservices help. This will be interesting to minimize the latency of your deployed services and databases.

Multicloud is a cloud computing deployment model that enables organizations to deliver application services across multiple private and public clouds containing some or a combination of the following: multiple cloud providers, multiple cloud accounts, multiple availability zones cloud or multiple regions or cloud premises.

Multicloud vs. hybride cloud

Multicloud and hybrid cloud are distinct but often complementary models. Hybrid cloud describes a variety of cloud types. In a hybrid cloud environment, an organization uses a mix of public and private clouds, on-premises or off-premises, to meet its IT needs. The goal of the hybrid cloud is to make everything work together, with varying degrees of communication and data sharing to better manage the day-to-day operations of a business.

For example, a multicloud environment might include: two public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, a public platform as a service (PaaS), on-demand management and security systems from public clouds, a private IaaS cloud for enterprise registration systems; and a private container as a service (CaaS) stack over public or private IaaS for engagement systems and cloud-native applications.

Let's start by separating the hybrid from the multicloud. As simple as it sounds, one already encounters a reasonable amount of confusion and conflicting definitions.

Let's start very simply:

Hybrid: Distribute workloads in the cloud and on-premises. Typically, these workloads relate to a single application, which means that the element in the cloud and the element on-premises interact to do specific processing like sending messages, events, or even data.

On the other hand in a multicloud context: It is an execution of workloads with several cloud providers. If we are more specific than that, opinions differ.

In contrast, a multi-cloud strategy is an architecture choice that you make. Examining common multi-cloud approaches and the motivations behind them helps us make those choices. The same tools in cloud providers handle multicloud too.

Benefits

• Risk mitigation, optimization, and quick access to the services you need.
• Flexibility in choosing the best services from each provider in relation to the needs of the organization.
• High availability
• Profitability
• Access to technology.

Disadvantages

• Manage resource skills: Managing multiple cloud environments requires expertise.
• Manage management tools and data transmission rate and security protocols.
• Lack of visibility into applications and their dependencies.

Challenges of hybrid and multicloud deployments

The multicloud environments help IT environments in modernisation, they make them more agile and flexible, they also create challenges due to the differences between cloud providers. For example, you need to address property lines - where do your management and security responsibilities end and where do cloud providers begin?

Integration: Some cloud services can work seamlessly from the start, but many require some level of integration, especially if you combine them with other resources in your IT environment, like a website or database. For the environment to function optimally, you will need to address the differences between each cloud in areas such as APIs, containerization, features, functions, and security protocols.

Portability and interoperability: Can you migrate components to more than one cloud without having to make major changes to each system? Once the components are moved to a cloud, you may also face interoperability issues with your on-premises systems.

Latency: The location of data, its proximity to the user, and distances to travel all contribute to latency issues. If users experience delays in accessing applications and databases due to latency, productivity can suffer, which would be counterproductive to using a multicloud approach that is supposed to provide benefits such as agility, flexibility and efficiency.

Privacy Rules: Regulations sometimes require you to use security controls like encryption when transmitting and storing data. Regulations may also restrict where you can archive personal data (such as medical, financial, and human resources records), so you need to know where the cloud infrastructure is located and whether it complies with relevant laws on it. data processing.

Multicloud Strategies

• Decide which workload belongs to which cloud.
• Ensure resilience to ensure business continuity after migration.
• Plan how to manage APIs for interoperability between cloud providers.
• Cover security controls, practices and solutions ensuring a secure environment.

Multicloud architecture

Arbitrary or Segmented

We will start by the arbitrary, most of multi-cloud failures in a company are related to a poor governance and excessive vendor influence. which means that some workloads are running in the orange cloud, some of them in the others (yellow or purple). So you can have applications or data in the orange and sometimes others in others cloud so you started with orange and then received huge purple credit thanks to existing licensing agreements.

And if you look closely, you can see a little bit of trouble due to a strong surge in sales. Strategy isn't exactly the word to use for this multi-cloud setup. That's not bad at all: at least you're deploying something in the cloud and we follow fashion and trend! This architecture is used when we start moving to the cloud with a huge on-premises infrastructure including a lot of technologies, it is good for starting because you will accumulate experience and develop skills with multiple technology platforms, so that you can master the advantages and disadvantages of each supplier in relation to your ecosystem.

If you start from arbitrary you can move to the segmented architecture, we can deploy specific types of workloads to specific clouds this is called the Segmentation of workloads across different clouds. You can deploy multiples scenarios to different vendor preferences for different types of workloads, for example due to individual vendor strengths or license terms.

Choice list or Parallel

Same previous architecture gives you the possibility to choose between cloud service providers, you always depend on the level of service of a single provider whatever the level of availability offered. Many companies are looking to deploy mission-critical applications requiring high availability and with almost no downtime across multiple clouds.

We will start talking about the choice list architecture, tthis configuration is a good first step for multi-cloud because every projects is free to use proprietary cloud services, such as managed databases (depending on their preferred trade-off between avoiding lock-in and minimizing operational overhead), so it gives you the choice of cloud service providers but you are still dependent on the level of service from a single provider so we will use the Parallel architecture, that is a littre bit complex to establish because you needdto deploy the same application to multiple clouds that requires some decoupling of cloud provider proprietary features. But we can conceptualize it as follows:

• Manage cloud-specific functions such as identity management, deployment automation, or monitoring of separate applications in a cloud-specific way.
• Use an open source components, they will generally work on any cloud. While this is portable in any environement (for example hosted Kubernetes is available on most clouds), it can reduce your ability to take advantage of other fully managed services, such as data stores or monitoring. Since managed services are one of the main benefits of migrating to the cloud, you should carefully consider your options.
• Use a multi-cloud abstraction framework so you can develop once and deploy to any cloud.
• Manage two branches for your cloud provider-specific application components and wrap them behind a common interface. For example, you could have a common interface for bulk data storage.

Portable

The big advice is when you start building your multicloud arhcitecture or hybrid architecture think about the availability of every solution for all providers, you can check this blog that help you to map between Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud solutions.Azure, AWS, and GCP: A Multicloud Service Cheat Sheet - DZone Cloud

The benefit of multicloud is free portability across clouds, which means you can deploy your workloads anywhere and move them around as you like. The advantages are easy to grasp: you can avoid vendor foreclosure, which gives you, for example, bargaining power. You can also move applications based on resource requirements. For example, you can run normal operations in one cloud and send excessive traffic to another.

Multi-cloud abstraction frameworks like Anthos promise to make this kind of setup easier. However, nothing is ever free, so the cost comes in the form of locking in a specific vendor, product, and architecture, as well as having to deploy the app in specific locations. containers. Also, these abstractions usually don't support your data: if you move your compute nodes between providers willy-nilly, how are you going to keep your data in sync? And if you can overcome this hurdle, the output data costs can eat into your pocket.

Azure Tools for Hybrid and Multicloud

•Azure Arc

•Azure Stack

•Azure IoT Edge

•Azure Sphere

•Azure StorSimple