Why stick to a single cloud for your application when you can get resources and services from different vendors? Forbes predicts multi-cloud destiny for most companies. Cloud computing and cloud deployments have now become a standard way for a software development life cycle. With so many vendors each having their pricing and offerings, a wise decision is always not to stick to just a single vendor. By exploring the catalogs of all the vendors, generally, it is very easy to identify which vendor is good for one functionality and which one is better for the other. By adopting a multi-cloud development and deployment strategy separation of concerns can also be achieved.
In this post, we shall be looking at some benefits you can get straightaway by switching to multi-clouds. But before that let’s have a look at the precautions.
A Word of Caution
As discussed above, having multiple clouds for infrastructure, storage, and backup is a considerate strategy. But with deploying and managing multiple clouds comes an added complexity and challenge when it comes to DevOps. Multi-cloud DevOps is relatively a new field in Software Engineering that tends to take care of these challenges and their remedies. When adopting multiple clouds, ensure that your team structure is capable enough to handle different environments and troubleshoot challenges and issues should they arise. Having this careful approach can increase the value you would get from having multiple cloud environments.
Cutting Costs
This is the first benefit you are likely to be blessed with. As mentioned above the cloud is the new way of deploying applications. They provide a fundamental backbone for infrastructure and resources for the applications. With more and more vendors offering cloud services, competition is high. Studying the pricing information and terms and conditions associated with them, you might come across other vendors providing the same resources at cheaper or more flexible terms.
Flexibility and Scalability
Multiple environments take you out of the realm of a single deployment machine and its limitations. So having different clouds in place you can scale your application as you like without disturbing other resources. You can also get vendors close to your geographical location so the content can be delivered through reduced latency time. You can achieve greater flexibility if you have designed your application in a decoupled manner so that changes in the environment can easily be accepted. Different cloud providers mostly work seamlessly with each other, so you can jump to another cloud during the load times to ensure that your application scales as needed.
New Ideas to Test Out
Be it serverless computing, machine learning SDKs, storage and caching options, or content delivery. Cloud computing is synonymous with innovation. More and more solutions are actively rolled out to ease your development and deployment operations. This means if your application is targeted to multiple environments, then the ultimate goal is your team is also going to benefit from this diversity. More innovative use cases and more challenging solutions result in storing foundation and better learning experience for the whole team.
Independent of Vendor
Deploying your application across multiple environments means you end the monopoly of a single vendor. So, if your cloud vendor is not proactive in terms of after-sales service, you can shift more critical components of your application to a better cloud vendor. Multi-cloud usage also helps in better negotiation. If you have an application hosted across multiple clouds, you can appear on the better side of the deal when setting up terms and conditions for the pricing. Draw the terms of the deal on your desires and if it does not work, you can always check out the next cloud vendor in the queue.
Better Robustness
They say: If anything can go wrong it will go wrong. Losing important data of the customers is always a challenge for the development teams. There is always a risk of loss/theft or unauthorized usage associated with backing up and storing information. But thanks to multiple cloud strategies, you get the improved resilience included in the package. If one cloud vendor comes under some calamity or danger, you can always get your application up in no time. Having multiple databases across multiple clouds can ensure your product is not the next target of ransomware. Every cloud vendor takes responsibility for the security of their cloud infrastructure. However, mishaps happen everywhere. Power cuts, shortages, disasters, and whatnot. Go with the multi-cloud strategy to tackle such scenarios.
Conclusion
In this post, we saw how multi-cloud developments and deployments can help us in achieving the level of application security and reliability every team desires. Just like we don’t depend upon a single language now to build applications, why depend on a single cloud for our application needs? Switch to multi-cloud but make sure you have done proper research and study before choosing.
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