Here are some characteristics that are typical of successful hybrid cloud
environments:
• A centralized identity infrastructure that applies across multiple
environments
• Persistent, secure high-speed connectivity between the enterprise and
the cloud environment
• Integrated networking that securely extends the corporate network,
creating a segmented but single overall network infrastructure
• Unified monitoring and resource management
Multi-cloud
This term seems relatively self explanatory: deploy cloud infrastructure on
more than one public cloud provider, with or without an existing private cloud.
However, the motivation for WHY companies might consider multi-cloud
approaches and architectures is where things get interesting.
Risk Reduction, (“Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket!”)
When organizations decide to go to public cloud, a typical concern is the per-
ception of risk associated with dependency on one external firm, such as Ama-
zon, Google or Microsoft. In response, it is common to wonder whether it
makes sense to minimize that perceived risk by using more than one cloud pro-
vider, thus maintaining a complete and separate environment in each one. This
provides an additional option in case the relationship with one provider
becomes untenable for some reason, and, in theory, makes it possible to main-
tain services in the event of an outage at one provider. There is obvious, instinc-
tive logic to this approach; however there are also some realities that argue
against it.
The first challenge is the complexity of maintaining an additional complete set
of architectures and operational relationships, one for each provider. Given
that most companies will already be operating in a hybrid cloud, this makes a
total of three environments that must be maintained and operated. That
doesn’t make multiple cloud providers impossible, but it needs to be under-
stood. Note that there are vendors who offer valuable third-party products and
services that can help provide standardized abstraction layers, theoretically
minimizing the complexity of managing multiple cloud providers. A good
example that comes to mind is Pivotal Cloud Foundry, especially known for
enabling applications to run on multiple clouds.
But an important note here is that as soon as you depend on an “abstraction”
provider, you have now re-created the single provider failure point you were
trying to avoid in the first place. In addition, there is nearly always lag time
between cloud providers releasing a feature, and the abstraction providers
being able to support that feature. This creates an agility penalty. Given that
enterprise agility and time-to-market for new products and features are criti-
cally important motivations for organizations to move to the cloud in the first
place, giving away some of that agility is counter-productive. Finally, because
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