As enterprises accelerate their migration to the cloud, they will inevitably find themselves managing services and applications across multiple cloud service providers. Although a multi-cloud strategy has definite benefits in terms of flexibility, resilience, and reduced risk of vendor lock-in, it also introduces new challenges for the software development team to manage.
With workloads and data scattered across multiple cloud providers, DevOps teams need cutting-edge practices that ensure reliability, performance, and efficiency. Here are some smarter approaches DevOps teams are embracing to simplify operations as they implement cutting-edge multi-cloud strategies to support digital transformation in their businesses.
Put a centralised platform in place:
Given that cloud service providers have different toolsets, many companies split their software development teams into squads that focus on a particular provider or functional role. A smarter is an approach to deploying a cloud-agnostic software delivery solution that enables DevOps teams to manage software delivery from a central platform. Vendor-agnostic tools are essential to avoid the trap of running separate teams using vendor-specific tools that lead to siloed delivery and vendor lock-in.
Standardise containers:
Standardising containers can vastly simplify software development and deployment in a multi-cloud environment. With applications running in containers that are based on a standard set of rules, developers can manage them in a streamlined continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline. They can also more easily run them across different providers.
Prioritise cloud and application migrations:
Given the complexity of DevOps in a multi-cloud environment, it is wise for an enterprise to prioritise migrations by one cloud and application at a time. As the teams become familiar with a cloud and its nuances, they can start to migrate to additional cloud providers. To decide which applications to migrate, evaluate which would benefit from a particular cloud’s features or cost, or which demand the redundancy of multiple clouds.
Create cloud-independent practices:
As the DevOps team familiarises itself with the tools, strengths, and weaknesses of different providers, it should develop templates and best practices. By sharing experiences and templates, they can accelerate learning and increase productivity.
The benefits of a multi-cloud environment:
A well-managed multi-cloud environment under the guidance of a knowledgeable DevOps team gives an enterprise a platform it can use to innovate and accelerate digital transformation. A company can match each application or workload to the provider which offers the best performance, cost, or functionality for the use case or which matches the compliance and data sovereignty needs.
It can also create multi-cloud clusters to improve redundancy and reliability, as well as to access features and functionality for an app that is not available from the provider that currently hosts it. The DevOps team can select the best cloud for each component of the pipeline to accelerate software releases. There may also be opportunities to bring costs down via vendor arbitrage.
Are you looking for a smarter way to manage your multi-cloud environment? Please get in touch to learn how our knowledgeable team can support your drive to simplify FinOps and DevOps.