—– By Matt Plummer, Chief Cloud Architect, ORock Technologies –
Multi-cloud has become the new normal, with organizations spinning up instances using traditional cloud service providers (CSP) — and running into problems. It is hard to reconcile and balance requirements between two hyperscale cloud service providers. Consider, for example, a division with a large corporation that uses a CSP for storage and another CSP for compute. With security, how does a user interact with these CSPs, given the ID and encryption that have to pass across both of them? Do you set up network security to allow the user to log into the system with their enterprise credentials in order to use both cloud environments, or does the user have to log out and back in, turning identity and access management (IAM) into a massive hassle? What I’m describing here isn’t multi-cloud, but two separate distinct clouds.
While building and managing a multi-cloud world is complex, having an enterprise view and a clear definition of where you want to go and how to shift and manage your multi-cloud environment is easier said than done. But once you get past the complexities, a land and expand multi-cloud strategy makes sense. It accelerates innovation and offers a more agile way to bring new services to your customers. It can be the centerpiece of your strategy to develop better products and protect against vendor lock-in. Furthermore, a land and expand multi-cloud environment can provide greater flexibility of workload distribution and improved continuity of operations.
Open-source Technology
Many CSPs don’t offer the security layers and meet all the regulatory compliance requirements that are necessary to run sensitive workloads. Our customers across the highly regulated industries and federal and state, local and education (SLED) government agencies know this all too well. While it may make strategic sense to continue with your current CSP because you’re using many of their proprietary services and are facing some kind of vendor lock-in for those services, you should consider open-source cloud services or a less expensive transport service (such as no egress fees) for everything else.
Open-source technology prevents vendor lock-in and affords you with the flexibility to leverage both open source-based services, the upstream community and what the cloud provider offers over proprietary services.
Microservices Architecture
Additionally, if you are considering running your application in containers, it’s important to have a microservice architecture that easily scales and adapts, updates and repairs as you go without bringing the entire system down. With a properly built cloud infrastructure, you can run microservices from containers that are fast and light weight. With microservices, you can quickly move resources as demand increases or decreases—both locally and within a second on-prem environment or cloud—and take advantage of more opportunities.
Choosing OpenStack Victoria, Wallaby and beyond
For many, the journey at connecting your multi-cloud may have just begun. You can expand what you have and grow the footprint of your cloud and the operations it supports. As you decide which workflows to put where, consider where to reduce complexity and aim to avoid vendor lock-in, choose a cloud that can deliver cutting-edge features and functionality at the speed of innovation.
At ORock, our customers are showing tremendous interest in the packages we’re offering to them with OpenStack Victoria and Wallaby platform, the 23rd version of the most widely deployed open-source cloud infrastructure software. OpenStack remains a foundational element for our cloud, providing ease of use, fluidity, high scalability and portability, self-healing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and so much more, to power solutions all the way to the edge.
Our customers are getting the latest features and functionality at a very fast speed by modernizing their IT with different services that aren’t offered by typical CSPs. What I mean by that is multi-cloud that is built for everyone and has a NOC and SOC, 24/7/365 customer service and no ingress or egress fees for network or data movement.
If you’ve been contemplating how to move ahead with your multi-cloud environment but aren’t sure what your next steps forward, we can help you sort through all your questions and remove the obstacles from your journey. Let’s talk about where you are and what your cloud goals can be. Our experienced team can help navigate the IT conversation and offer a modern approach to reach cloud success.
If you are going from on-premises to cloud, or from a cloud-to-cloud environment, there is a repeatable methodology that improves cloud adoption and efficiency. It starts with rationalization, followed by a migration phase and then ends with sustainment efforts. During the rationalization phase, you are in the assessment of cloud everything, analyzing your infrastructure and planning how the servers and applications come together to support your business. With migration comes modernization, transition and testing of the application or service. Once you have arrived at sustainment, your cloud implementation requires a deployment and operations plan.
