Use of several cloud services by individual cloud user has become a new normal. This has been clearly brought out by 2016 RightScale State of the Cloud Report that confirms use of average of six cloud services by every user of cloud. Multiple clouds being used by any user is usually an assortment of public and private cloud solutions. This may also account for clouds that are commissioned for the purpose of testing or experimentation.

Basics of cloud adoption

It is interesting to note that organizations are adopting cloud in a plethora of ways following significant growth and development of cloud computing. The major considerations that influence an organization’s approach to implementation of cloud computing are impact on agility, scalability, UX, cost and reliability to name a few. Majority of cloud adoptions are focused on differences between private and public cloud.

               

These can be listed as follows:

Attributes of public cloud

   - Ability to handle demand fluctuations

   - Context

   - Unpredictability of amplitude

   - Multiplexing of customers

   - Wider geographical dispersion

Features of private cloud

   - Predictable scalability

   - Demand stability

   - Predictability of amplitude

   - Ability of geo specific implementation

   - Cost benefits

One must ensure that the deployment of number of cloud must be performed in swift manner. The speed of deployment of cloud systems is an important consideration while choosing the right cloud service provider. If majority of the cloud experts are to be believed, deployment of multiple clouds must be backed by an application driven strategy.

 

               

Choosing clouds that are relevant to apps

There is a growing trend of using the right app by choosing right cloud and majority of organizations are operating two public clouds. There are multiple issues to be concerned about while using multiple clouds including security related issues, data fragmentation, challenges of migration, overall administration. Dependence on multi cloud strategy is not something which is going happen in future. In fact it is already visible in many organizations.

Use of multiple clouds can be effectively adopted by prudently selecting additional services before actual process of implementation. Selection of clouds needs to be based on app needs and not vice versa. Price should never become the criteria of selection of clouds since the prices are bound to drop in future. The selection parameters for cloud should include mobile platforms, databases, integration tolls, and analytics.

Overcome lock-in threat before making right choice

One should never lose the opportunity to implement APIs that are designed to facilitate agility and reduce complexities of cloud management. It is advisable to benefit from proprietary cloud services including BigQuery or AWS Lambda without being overly concerned about possibility of lock-in.

Striking examples of multiple cloud implementation

It would be interesting to look into some live examples of cloud adoption in respectable organizations. Apple has been implementing a hybrid cloud strategy by depending upon private cloud for power of computing and energy and other workloads are managed via Google, AWS, and MS Azure.

Cost considerations of public cloud and availability of a private data centers had been blocking Evernote’s decision to adopt public cloud. However the company has only recently moved to public cloud. Walmart presents an ideal example of an integrated approach since it has adopted private clouds in individual stores while managing some of the workloads through public clouds.

Prior to Instagram becoming a big social media enterprise, it leveraged public cloud for its photo sharing app. In 2012 it crossed over to private cloud. Visibility into customer data and more effective ecommerce management were the two important driving forces for Target to shift from public to private cloud environment.

GE is one the major organizations that are known to be public cloud advocators. However, it is banking on private cloud for maintaining some its traditional apps. Netflix can be considered to be operating hybrid architecture. In spite of moving its privately operated data center to AWS public cloud there are multiple components being run in private cloud such as streaming CDN and DVD enterprise. The major workloads that are being handled in public cloud are trans-coding and recommendation engine.

               

Tackling challenges in cloud

One cannot overlook significance of addressing some the big challenges of cloud adoption while considering the benefits of the state of the art cloud computing technology.

Major issues such as cloud latency and identity access management need to be addressed appropriately.

Presence of a multitude of agnostic versions of cloud forces enterprises to perform redundant work on several endpoints. One way to deal with the issue is to implement a loosely coupled architecture that enables abstraction of APIs of specific cloud provider from the rest of the code.

This can be explained by understanding the example of an application that needs to be written to cloud storage. There needs to be a separate function for particular cloud provider and the call should only be made to that provider.

Cloud latency is another concern that can be effectively addressed by services at cloud edge including cross connection solutions.

In conclusion

An application driven approach should be adopted by organizations that are adopting multiple clouds for hassle free management of challenges. The challenges are also easily manageable by considering APIs and edge services. Companies need to prepare themselves for adopting specific cloud combinations due to migration of more and more applications to cloud.