The emergence of multi-cloud and its distinction from hybrid cloud

With businesses increasingly embracing cloud services, they began recognizing the potential benefits of not being tied to a single cloud provider for their diverse application and business needs. This insight led to the emergence of multi-cloud: a strategy that leverages multiple cloud service providers to address the unique requirements of an application or organization. In this section, we’ll delve into the factors that inspired developers to adopt multi-cloud strategies, the primary advantages it offers from a developer’s standpoint with the support of platform engineers, and the challenges they encounter when implementing a multi-cloud approach. We will also briefly distinguish multi-cloud from the related concept of hybrid cloud.

Multi-cloud versus hybrid cloud

Before diving into multi-cloud details, it is essential to understand the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud since they are related but distinct concepts. Multi-cloud refers to using multiple cloud service providers to fulfill different aspects of an application or organization’s needs. In contrast, a hybrid cloud combines different public cloud services with private cloud or on-premises infrastructure. A hybrid cloud enables developers to maintain sensitive data and applications in a private or on-premises environment while leveraging public cloud services’ scalability and cost benefits for other workloads.

Though the two concepts differ, some developers may adopt a hybrid multi-cloud strategy for their applications by combining public and private clouds from multiple providers to meet their specific needs and application and business expectations. This approach offers both hybrid and multi-cloud strategy benefits, providing greater flexibility, cost optimization, and risk mitigation.

Note

Throughout this section, we will primarily focus on the multi-cloud concept while ensuring that the information and discussions provided apply to hybrid and multi-cloud cloud models.

• Private cloud (on-premises): A secure, proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people, with certain access and permissions settings
• Public cloud: Computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet, making them available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them
• Hybrid cloud: An environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms, allowing for greater flexibility and optimization of existing infrastructure
• Multi-cloud: The use of multiple cloud computing services from different providers in a single heterogeneous architecture, to reduce reliance on any single vendor, increase flexibility, and mitigate against disasters

Figure 1.3 delineates the nuances between the following:

Figure 1.3 – Understanding the different cloud deployment models.

Understanding the significance of multi-cloud

As developers of the different organizations gained experience working with cloud services, they started to see the value of leveraging multiple cloud providers to address their application and business needs. This realization sparked the adoption of multi-cloud strategies, which involve using multiple cloud service providers to achieve a range of objectives.

Several factors contributed to the rise of multi-cloud, including the following:

• Avoid vendor lock-in: Developers who rely on a single cloud provider can find it challenging to switch to another provider or adopt new technologies in the future for the application demands. Typically, multi-cloud strategies help developers avoid this lock-in by using a mix of cloud services from different providers, enabling greater flexibility and freedom to innovate.
• Cost optimization: Each cloud provider has a pricing model and offers unique services and features. By using multiple cloud providers, developers can optimize costs by choosing the best services for their specific needs and taking advantage of price differences between providers, if this is done correctly.
• Performance and latency improvements: Using multiple cloud providers can improve application performance by distributing workloads across data centers and geographical locations, reducing end user latency.
• Compliance and regulatory requirements: Developers may need to comply with specific data residency or regulatory requirements that dictate where data can be stored and processed. Multi-cloud strategies enable developers to choose cloud providers that meet these requirements while still benefiting from the advantages of cloud computing.
• Risk mitigation and business continuity: Relying on a single cloud provider can pose risks in case of provider-specific outages or service disruptions. Multi-cloud strategies help developers mitigate these risks by distributing workloads across multiple providers, ensuring application resilience.

Challenges of multi-cloud

While implementing a multi-cloud strategy offers numerous advantages, developers, along with platform engineers (who manage the underlying platform for modern applications), must also navigate a unique set of challenges. In this section, we’ll discuss some critical hurdles developers may face during multi-cloud implementation and provide insights on overcoming them effectively:

• Increased complexity: Managing multiple cloud providers adds complexity to development and operations as developers must deal with different management interfaces, APIs, and service offerings, where still platform engineers play the role of simplifying these complexities.
• Security and compliance concerns: Ensuring consistent security and compliance across multiple cloud providers can be challenging as each provider has its security features and configurations.
• Data management and integration: Integrating data and applications across multiple cloud providers can be complex, requiring robust data management strategies and tools to ensure data consistency, integrity, and availability.
• Cost management: While multi-cloud strategies can optimize costs, they can also make tracking and controlling expenses across different providers and services more difficult. Platform engineers need to implement comprehensive cost management tools and practices to maximize the benefits of their multi-cloud strategy for developers.

As we progress through this book, we’ll discuss strategies and best practices from a developer’s perspective for overcoming these challenges and successfully implementing a multi-cloud strategy that optimizes cost, performance, and resilience. We’ll delve deeper into the principles and architecture of cloud-native applications, explore tools and technologies that facilitate multi-cloud development, and examine real-world examples to help you apply these concepts in your projects.

With a solid multi-cloud and cloud-native development foundation, you’ll be well-prepared to tackle the challenges and opportunities of building and deploying modern applications in a multi-cloud world. Stay with us as we explore this exciting new frontier in software development.