Multicloud

Last updated

Multicloud (also written as multi-cloud or multi cloud) refers to a company utilizing multiple cloud computing services from various public vendors within a single, heterogeneous architecture. This approach enhances cloud infrastructure capabilities and optimizes costs. It also refers to the distribution of cloud assets, software, applications, etc. across several cloud-hosting environments. With a typical multicloud architecture utilizing two or more public clouds as well as multiple private clouds, a multicloud environment aims to eliminate the reliance on any single cloud provider and thereby alleviate vendor lock-in.

Contents

For instance, an enterprise may use separate cloud providers for infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), software (SaaS) and container (FaaS) services. [1] In the latter case, they may use different infrastructure providers for different workloads, deploy a single workload load balanced across multiple providers (active-active), or deploy a single workload on one provider, with a backup on another (active-passive).

Advantages and challenges

There are several advantages to using a multicloud approach, including the ability to negotiate better pricing with cloud providers, the ability to quickly switch to another provider if needed, and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in. Multicloud can also be a good way to hedge against the risks of obsolescence, as it allows you to rely on multiple vendors and open standards, which can prolong the life of your systems. [2]

Additional benefits of the multicloud architecture include adherence to local policies that require certain data to be physically present within the area/country, geographical distribution of processing requests from physically closer cloud unit which in turn reduces latency and protect against disasters. [3] [2]

Various issues and challenges also present themselves in a multicloud environment. [3] Security and governance is more complicated, and more "moving parts" may create resiliency issues.

Difference between multicloud and hybrid cloud

Multicloud differs from hybrid cloud in that it refers to multiple cloud services from different vendors rather than multiple deployment modes (on-premises hardware, and public and private, cloud hosting). [4] [5] However, when considering a broad definition of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud can still be regarded as a special form of multi-cloud.

See also

Related Research Articles

A virtual storage area network is a logical representation of a physical storage area network (SAN). A VSAN abstracts the storage-related operations from the physical storage layer, and provides shared storage access to the applications and virtual machines by combining the servers' local storage over a network into a single or multiple storage pools.

Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as on-demand software, web-based software, or web-hosted software.

Software multitenancy is a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. Systems designed in such manner are "shared". A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance - including its data, configuration, user management, tenant individual functionality and non-functional properties. Multitenancy contrasts with multi-instance architectures, where separate software instances operate on behalf of different tenants.

Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing platform and one or more applications, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching the application(s), and to allow developers to create, develop, and package such software bundles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared Internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppScale</span> American cloud infrastructure software company

AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, however, its source code remains freely available to the open-source community.

Kaavo is a cloud computing management company. Kaavo was founded in November 2007 in the U.S. Kaavo pioneered top-down application-centric management of cloud infrastructure across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

A cloud storage gateway is a hybrid cloud storage device, implemented in hardware or software, which resides at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs such as SOAP or REST to block-based storage protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or SMB.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenNebula</span> Cloud-computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures

OpenNebula is a hyper-converged infrastructure platform for managing heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures. The OpenNebula platform manages a data center's virtual infrastructure to build private, public and hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to maintenance releases but with upgrades to new minor/major versions only available for users with non-commercial deployments or with significant contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.

HP Cloud Service Automation is cloud management software from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that is used by companies and government agencies to automate the management of cloud-based IT-as-a-service, from order, to provision, and retirement. HP Cloud Service Automation orchestrates the provisioning and deployment of complex IT services such as of databases, middleware, and packaged applications. The software speeds deployment of application-based services across hybrid cloud delivery platforms and traditional IT environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Converged storage</span>

Converged storage is a storage architecture that combines storage and computing resources into a single entity. This can result in the development of platforms for server centric, storage centric or hybrid workloads where applications and data come together to improve application performance and delivery. The combination of storage and compute differs to the traditional IT model in which computation and storage take place in separate or siloed computer equipment. The traditional model requires discrete provisioning changes, such as upgrades and planned migrations, in the face of server load changes, which are increasingly dynamic with virtualization, where converged storage increases the supply of resources along with new VM demands in parallel.

Managed private cloud refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serves a single client organization (tenant), and is managed by a third party. The third-party provider is responsible for providing the hardware for the server and also for preliminary maintenance. This is in contrast to multitenancy, where multiple client organizations share a single server, or an on-premises deployment, where the client organization hosts its software instance.

HP CloudSystem is a cloud infrastructure from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that combines storage, servers, networking and software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP Cloud</span> Set of cloud computing services

HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard that offered public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, managed private cloud and other cloud services. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 until 2016.

Network as a service (NaaS) brings software-defined networking (SDN), programmable networking and API-based operation to WAN services, transport, hybrid cloud, multicloud, Private Network Interconnect, and internet exchange points.

Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages the IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and deliver communication services.

Cloud computing has become a social phenomenon used by most people every day. As with every important social phenomenon there are issues that limit its widespread adoption. In the present scenario, cloud computing is seen as a fast developing area that can instantly supply extensible services by using internet with the help of hardware and software virtualization. The biggest advantage of cloud computing is flexible lease and release of resources as per the requirement of the user. Other benefits encompass betterment in efficiency, compensating the costs in operations. It curtails down the high prices of hardware and software Although, there are numerous benefits of adopting the latest cloud technology still there are privacy issues involved in cloud computing because in the cloud at any time the data can outbreak the service provider and the information is deleted purposely. There are security issues of various kinds related with cloud computing falling into two broader categories: First, the issues related to the cloud security that the cloud providers face. Secondly, the issues related to the cloud security that the customers experience

Cloud management is the management of cloud computing products and services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mirantis</span> Cloud computing software and services company

Mirantis Inc. is a Campbell, California, based B2B open source cloud computing software and services company. Its primary container and cloud management products, part of the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform suite of products, are Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. The company focuses on the development and support of container and cloud infrastructure management platforms based on Kubernetes and OpenStack. The company was founded in 1999 by Alex Freedland and Boris Renski. It was one of the founding members of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September, 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. Mirantis has been an active member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since 2016.

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, VMs, or physical servers. Serverless computing does not hold resources in volatile memory; computing is rather done in short bursts with the results persisted to storage. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.

References

  1. ↑ "Multicloud: A cheat sheet". TechRepublic. 2020-12-24. Retrieved 2022-02-24.
  2. 1 2 Brand, Aron (February 17, 2020). "You Might Want to Rethink Monogamy (When Clouds are in Question)". Tech Monitor.
  3. 1 2 Synytsky, Ruslan. "How To Overcome The Challenges Of Gaining Multi-Cloud Interoperability". Forbes Technology Council. Retrieved 25 October 2018.
  4. ↑ Rouse, Margaret. "What is a multi-cloud strategy". SearchCloudApplications. Retrieved 3 July 2014.
  5. ↑ King, Rachel. "Pivotal's head of products: We're moving to a multi-cloud world". ZDnet. Retrieved 3 July 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.