Multiple clouds mean multiple ways of doing things. This is true for monitoring and for the day to operations of deploying and supporting your workloads in the cloud. The cloud’s reputation for agility means getting things done fast is even more of a goal than usual, but you have to overcome these multicloud challenges to make that happen:
• Cloud dashboards need to be secure. Federated, single-sign on simplifies access for employees, but having the same credentials across multiple clouds increases vulnerabilities. Having different credentials across multiple clouds increases complexity.
• Different tools work differently. Your IT team needs to learn different deployment, monitoring, and management tools for each cloud environment; even when they provide the same functionality, the interfaces and commands are likely different.
• Applications may not be the same across the cloud. Even when the same products are available in multiple clouds, they may not be the same versions. Each cloud provider can update products on a different schedule. Deployments may not work as expected due to subtle differences in the products they depend on. You may need to devote additional time to testing before deployments to be sure they’ll work everywhere.
• Security and governance differ on different platforms. Keeping systems in the cloud secure remains critical and is made more difficult by different implementation on every cloud.
In order to minimize the deployment problems due to multicloud, take the following steps:
• Understand your cloud architecture thoroughly. It’s hard to keep track of what’s running where in a multicloud environment, as instances come online and are shutdown frequently. But making sure deployments work requires understanding your architecture in detail. VAST View gives you visibility everywhere you have IT resources.
• Understand your new capabilities. Take time to train your staff and get them familiar with the capabilities of each of your cloud providers. Your migration plan should include developing new deployment and support procedures.
• Minimize use of native APIs. Consider the issues carefully before going cloud native. The more you depend on functions specific to a single cloud provider, the harder it is for your team to develop and deploy applications that work across all your cloud providers.
• Use automation extensively. Deployment isn’t just about major releases; it’s about patches and configuration changes, too. Use automation tools as much as possible to ensure changes get distributed across all systems.
VAST IT Services helps businesses understand how to use multicloud effectively in support of business goals, including agility. Through our support of AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle, we offer insight and expertise with all the major cloud providers. Contact us to start leveraging our knowledge in building your multicloud infrastructure.
