The cloud has completely changed the way businesses work, allowing them to be more flexible and dynamic with their strategies, offerings and resources. It’s almost impossible to imagine an organization that doesn’t use any kind of cloud technology or service.
According to Gartner85% of organizations will be “cloud-first” by 2025. Companies are shifting their focus from on-premises hardware infrastructure to leveraging managed services offered in the cloud. Organizations now benefit from lower total cost of ownership, easier access to new services, faster deployment times, and better scalability and availability.
What is multicloud architecture?
Multicloud architecture is a cloud computing strategy that uses multiple cloud services from different providers to meet different needs and requirements. It gives businesses the ability to have control over where data, applications, and workloads are hosted.
A multicloud configuration can increase availability, redundancy and improve performance by enabling enterprises to spread their workloads across different providers. It also allows organizations to switch between service providers depending on their offerings.
With a multicloud architecture, companies can mix and match storage, networking, analytics, and application platforms from multiple providers instead of getting all their resources from one provider that may not best suit their workloads.
TO SEE: Multicloud explained: a cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
Why use a multicloud environment?
There are many reasons to consider a multicloud environment. Cloud computing has helped reshape business practices by providing access to computing power once available only in data centers and owned by large companies.
But to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, organizations must have an infrastructure strategy that includes several IT aspects: storage, data backup, and network capacity.
The multicloud strategy increases availability and resilience by spreading workloads across multiple cloud providers. It can improve performance by allowing companies to choose the best provider for each workload or even specific tasks within that workload.
Furthermore, a multicloud approach also offers more choice in terms of features, licensing models and migration strategies when considering the needs of an organization over time. It also provides more options for the ultimate deployment of infrastructure and applications, ultimately leading to greater control over cost and performance.
What is the basic pattern for multicloud architecture?
Multicloud network architecture can increase availability and redundancy and improve performance and security. Multicloud architecture patterns across distributed and redundant deployments.
Distributed Deployment Patterns
Distributed deployment architectures distribute workloads across many providers for improved availability, greater scalability, and lower costs. These patterns are especially effective when using the feature or capability of a cloud provider.
Distributed deployment patterns include:
- Layered Hybrid Pattern: This tiering usually consists of front- and back-end applications.
- Partitioned Multicloud Pattern: This allows users to move workloads as needed while maintaining portability.
- Cloud Analytics Pattern: This pattern places analytic tasks in the cloud and returns data as needed.
- Edge hybrid: This pattern solves connectivity issues by running time- and business-critical tasks locally at the network edge and leveraging the cloud for other workloads.
Redundant Deployment Patterns
Meanwhile, redundant implementations provide fault tolerance by running two or more instances of the same system in parallel. Users can also configure a redundant deployment with automated failover that moves one instance to a standby role in the event that the primary instance goes down or becomes unavailable.
Finally, multi-region deployment provides resilience in the event of a disaster hitting one region, while providing proximity and access to resources.
Redundant deployment patterns include:
- Active-Active: The application is hosted with different cloud providers in active-active multicloud. Every application would have a load balancer up front to manage the traffic.
- Active passive: The alternate cloud provider is only used if a server crashes or service is interrupted; it might switch to a backup server on pre-set traffic triggers, and the traffic is automatically routed to the secondary provider instead of the main server.
- public private: This architecture includes public and private cloud servers. Private clouds often have a firewall and more extensive security to limit access to what is needed to share with the private cloud.
Types of multicloud architecture?
clouding
With this architecture, application components are hosted on-premises and after migration to a public cloud, they continue to run as before. Cloudification allows applications hosted on-premises to leverage cloud services from various cloud platforms for improved performance and elasticity.
TO SEE: Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer (Tech Republic Premium)
Multicloud relocation
This type of architecture allows organizations to move data and applications to different cloud providers depending on their needs. It can be done for various reasons such as cost savings, performance improvements or to take advantage of new features.
In multicloud relocation, an on-premises application can be migrated to the cloud and configured to use a service from another cloud provider.
Multicloud refactor
Multicloud refactoring aims to take advantage of cloud bursting, high availability, and failover capabilities provided by multiple clouds. To do this, applications must be redesigned so that they can be deployed in a multicloud environment. With multicloud move, applications may not need to be modified for deployment on more than one platform.
But multicloud refactoring requires applications to be redesigned to work in environments with different requirements. Individual components can be scaled independently of each other. High-consumption components can then be easily supplied independently of low-consumption components.
Multicloud Rebinding
Multicloud rebinding also involves redesigning applications for migration to a multicloud architecture. Multicloud rebinding can be used to create highly available and fault tolerant systems. It can also improve performance by distributing workloads across multiple clouds.
This architecture has a split between on-premises and cloud resources, with some components remaining on-premises while others are moved to the cloud.
Multicloud rebinding with cloud brokerage
In a multicloud rebinding with a cloud brokerage scenario, a cloud brokerage service is used to help connect multiple cloud services. This type of architecture allows a redesigned application to be partially deployed on a multicloud infrastructure. This can improve availability by ensuring that no single point of failure exists for any part of the application.
Modernization of multiple applications
Modernizing multiple applications requires redesigning several apps as a portfolio and then deploying them in a multicloud network architecture rather than just redesigning a single application for multicloud deployment.
The benefits of multicloud architecture
There are many benefits to using a multicloud architecture. This environment enables enterprises to efficiently use all available resources without being hindered by vendor lock-in, be more flexible with their IT investments and lower operational costs in general.
TO SEE: What you need to know about multicloud adoption (TechRepublic)
Prevent vendor lock-in
By avoiding vendor lock-in, you are not limited to just one provider. It allows an organization to use multiple providers that can offer different services. Businesses will also be given the option to choose which provider best suits their needs.
Increase flexibility and agility
By leveraging a multicloud architecture, enterprises can increase their flexibility and agility. This setup allows businesses to switch between cloud platforms to meet their changing demands.
Improve disaster recovery
By using this type of setup, companies can improve their disaster recovery capabilities as they can distribute their workloads across different cloud providers.
Optimize cloud costs
With a multicloud architecture, money can be saved by hosting applications on the most appropriate type of cloud that fits the needs of an organization.
There is no need to pay for services from every provider to keep everything running. Companies only pay for what they use. In addition, organizations can easily scale up or down according to their needs at any time.
Multicloud vs Hybrid Cloud: What’s the Difference?
Multicloud and the hybrid cloud can be confusing because more than one cloud environment is used. The main difference is that a multicloud strategy uses multiple cloud providers for different purposes, while a hybrid cloud integrates on-premises and cloud resources.
A multicloud architecture refers to the use of multiple cloud computing services in a single heterogeneous IT environment. A hybrid cloud architecture, on the other hand, combines on-premises, private and public cloud services in one integrated infrastructure.
The choice between these two approaches mainly depends on what level of abstraction of an IT environment is required. A multicloud strategy allows companies to choose the best solution for different workloads, while a hybrid approach gives greater control over workload placement and customization options.
