Multi-cloud or Multicloud is a deployment model that uses several instances of cloud solutions from different vendors. It allows organizations to benefit from various cloud services from different vendors. Multicloud deployments can include multiple IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions from different vendors. Most organizations are using open-source and cloud-native technologies for their multi-cloud solutions.
Kubernetes, supported by all major cloud providers, are very popular. Multicloud allows organizations to optimize infrastructure capabilities and spending by enabling them to choose the vendor that offers the ideal solution to suit the organization’s needs.
Benefits of multi-cloud
The multi-cloud model offers various benefits, especially for large organizations. Most importantly, multicloud enables organizations to use multiple provider-specific services from various vendors that suit their needs. Organizations can also scale their services quickly to be able to adapt to their changing needs. Another important benefit is containerized applications, which are very popular in recent years and make the deployment process much easier.
Multi-cloud also allows customers to choose their local cloud vendor, which helps them reduce the latency. They can also choose the provider that stores the sensitive data, allowing the organization to comply with government regulations and data sovereignty laws. Since it includes various public cloud solutions, multi-cloud is relatively cheaper than other alternatives. It also eliminates the risk of DDoS attacks, as they target only one service within the multi-cloud.
How does multi-cloud work?
Due to its nature, multi-cloud architecture is very complicated. It depends on the roles of the individual clouds that will be used in the multi-cloud environment. The multicloud architecture includes a master deployment, which is the leader of the environment. The planning phase is very important because any error can limit the organization’s ability to scale, make upgrades, and adopt new solutions. It uses virtualization, containerization, software-defined networking, and software-defined storage technologies to be able to divide resources and allocate them to virtual machines or containers. It also requires multicloud management software to manage the environment.
What is multi-cloud management?
Multi-cloud management includes tools and procedures allowing an organization to monitor, optimize, and secure applications and workloads across the multi-cloud deployment. The IT team can manage multiple clouds from a single dashboard of the multi-cloud management software. These solutions support multi-cloud deployments and container orchestration tools. It can be very challenging for inexperienced IT teams to manage a multicloud environment, which requires them to maintain security and compliance policies, deploy applications into target environments, and monitor the entire system.
Ideal multi-cloud management software should be capable of simplifying these tasks for the IT teams. Without the help of such software, an organization can waste money on unnecessary resources, experience outages, or worse.
Advantages and disadvantages of multi-cloud
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔ Organizations can pick the most affordable solutions that are ideal for them and combine them in a multi-cloud environment to lower the costs. | ✘ Managing a multi-cloud environment requires a highly trained IT team that can balance loads across different clouds and handle other management tasks. |
| ✔ Multi-cloud is a reliable deployment model. If a service from a vendor goes offline, the customer can use another service from another vendor that provides the same functionality. | ✘ To fulfill user requests, multiple cloud solutions should communicate with each other, causing increased latency. |
| ✔ Multi-cloud offers the much-needed scalability, similar to most other cloud models, allowing organizations to scale the solutions they are paying for. | ✘ A multi-cloud environment uses multiple software and hardware together, which increases the attack surface. |
| ✔ New technologies like containers are making it easier to deploy containerized applications. |
What is the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are very similar terms and can be confused easily. The most significant difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud is that multi-cloud uses multiple public clouds. If the environment includes at least 1 public cloud and 1 private cloud, it becomes a hybrid cloud. Thus, all hybrid clouds are multi-clouds, however, all multi-clouds are not hybrid clouds. Multi-cloud is a wider term that may include the private cloud. Both methods are very popular among large organizations recently