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Multicloud is typically understood to be an evolutionary step for enterprises that are moving past a single-cloud starting phase toward a “best of breed” approach to cloud offerings. Various factors dictate this. For some, it’s the diversity of workloads that require platform-specific functionality. For others, it’s an evolutionary journey, or a result of mergers and acquisitions.
Lately, we are seeing companies choose multicloud as a primary, cloud-first strategy right out of the gate. In some cases the reason is to reduce dependency on a single vendor, as the platform vendors start building more stickiness into their offerings. In other cases it is to optimize costs, depending on the workload characteristics. There are strong arguments on both these dimensions and it’s not unlike what we saw with hardware platforms.
Regardless of why you’re choosing to operate in multiple clouds, it does introduce some complexity, which, if not managed carefully, can outstrip the cost-saving component of the multicloud strategy and bedevil your performance goals.
That’s why visibility is so important. But like the shift to multicloud itself, a shift in data sets—to measure health and performance of WAN, Internet, cloud, and SaaS provider segments in addition to on-prem networks—is needed to gain operational visibility. In this article, we’ll unpack a few key terms that are connected to multicloud deployment, explain why traditional visibility approaches fall short in the cloud, and explore the approach needed to gain visibility for multicloud operations.
Hybrid cloud vs. multicloud
Hybrid cloud typically refers to a combination of existing legacy data centers, with some services consumed from the cloud. Most applications today are hybrid because they use one or more external API-based services, whether for authentication, payments, or logistics. If your internally hosted app makes a call to Azure AD or Okta for authentication, you are effectively running a hybrid cloud. If your website has a PayPal or Visa payment widget, you’re using hybrid cloud.
As applications get atomized into their constituent services and communicate only via structured API calls, it becomes feasible to locate and scale each component separately. This makes infrastructure and platform services like AWS extremely enticing. So while some core...