Life in a Multicloud World

Vendors have developed clouds for an assortment of purposes. Instead of choosing just one
cloud model, IT teams are investing in multiple platforms so they can create a color wheel
of tools and workloads that dont clash.

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Deployment Options Multiply

Early cloud efforts were seen by CFOs

and CIOs as ways to trim IT costs through
reductions in infrastructure, staff and operating
expenses. The strategy of migrating the easiest-to-move services has changed and matured
into putting services and applications into the
cloud that have the biggest positive impact
on the business as a whole and the customer
experience in particular.
The result is services and applications running across a mix of private and public clouds,
operated by providers with methods and tools
that can be profound in their differences. For
IT, deploying these diverse platforms is a challenge that must be surmounted to ensure continual operation and advancement.
Part one of this handbook is my examination of the all-hands-on-deck coordination
needed when deploying a multicloud infrastructure. With more than 80% of enterprises
now embracing a multicloud strategy, deploying

LIFE IN A MULTICLOUD WORLD

services in a consistent and repeatable way is

essential for IT to maintain control.
In part two, technology consultant Kurt
Marko defines and examines the cloud deployment models that exist for todays enterprise
applications. Marko scrutinizes public, private
and hybrid cloud deployments and discusses
when to make the transition from one model to
another. He concludes with three ways to analyze make-or-buy choices.
Marko returns for part three and looks at
how to manage app deployments on multiple cloud-computing platforms. While care is
needed to manage applications and infrastructure configurations across cloud stacks that
do not share a common API, he suggests that
multiple platforms are often ideal to minimize
dependence on a sole provider. n
Joel Shore
News Writer, SearchCloudApplications

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Multicloud Deployment Acceptance Soars

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Deploy your companys compute load

across multiple clouds, providers and services,
and youll be better-protected against complete
disaster if a server fails.
Thats an increasingly popular and practical
notion. As a result, adoption of a multicloud
approach, sometimes called a cloud portfolio,
is growing quickly. In a report on the cloud,
RightScale Inc.a provider of cloud portfolio
management servicesnoted that as of January 2015, 82% of surveyed enterprises are now
employing a multicloud strategy, up from 74%
just one year earlier. Within that group, a mix
of public and private clouds is favored by 55%,
while those opting solely for multiple private
or multiple public clouds are split almost
equally (14% and 13%, respectively).
As companies simultaneously move applications and data to the public cloud, keep others
on-premises and integrate with software-asa-service providers, its important for them to

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deploy services in a consistent and repeatable

way. [Fail] to work this way, and IT operations
will not be able to maintain control, said Bailey Caldwell, RightScales vice president of customer success.
A cadre of nine Forrester Research analysts
stated in a report that automating is the answer
to the fundamental issues of scale, speed, cost
and accuracy.
Commenting on the report in relation to
cloud deployment, analyst Dave Bartoletti said,
You may have built a workload for Amazon
[Web Services] that you now want to run in
[Microsoft] Azure, or replace with a database
in Salesforce, or use an ERP system like SAP in
the cloud. You need a consistent way to deploy
this.
The problem, Bartoletti explained, is that
businesses find deployment across these varied platforms difficult largely due to a lack
of tools with cross-platform intelligence.

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Traditionally, youd use the tool that comes

with the platform, perhaps vCenter Server
for VMware vSphere environments or AWS
OpsWorks to deploy on Amazon.
The tools landscape is still adapting to the
reality of multicloud. In a survey of hybrid
cloud management offerings, Bartoletti analyzed 36 vendors, several of which offer tools
that manage multiprovider cloud platforms
along with application development and
delivery.
Consistency appears to be the keyword for
existing in a multicloud universe. It matters
because nothing stays still in the cloud for very
long, including the apps and data you provide
and the actual infrastructures, services and
pricing of each provider.
If you want to move applications, data and
services among different providersand you
will as part of a continuous deployment strategyits important to have consistency and a
level of efficiency for managing those disparate
environments, said Mark Bowker, an analyst at
The Enterprise Strategy Group.
Technical reasons for periodically fine-tuning a deployment strategy include:

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Availability of new services from one provider that constitutes a competitive or

operational advantage;
Difficulties with a provider;
A need to mirror deployments across multiple geographies to bolster performance;
A requirement to ensure that network
communications paths avoid certain locales
in order to protect data assets; and
A desire to bring analytics services to where
the data resides.

Nontechnical reasons might include changes

to a favorable pricing model and the ability
of one cloud provider to more fully follow
an enterprises compliance and governance
requirements.
Similarly, the degree to which a cloud provider meets regulatory requirements can lead
to redeployment of applications or data from
one vendor to another, said Lief Morin, president of Key Information Systems.

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When a business reaches a certain size,

it has more leverage to dictate security terms
to the provider; otherwise, the provider
will dictate them down to the organization.
Its a matter of economics and scale, he said.
In a multicloud environment, it gets more
complicated. More providers mean more
risk, so its crucial to work with them to
ensure a consistent, standardized policy.
A multicloud deployment model should
be a quasi-permanent arrangement
quasi because nearly everything changes
eventually.
What youre seeing today is movement
toward an application-configured infrastructure environment, noted Roy Ritthaller,
vice president of marketing for IT operations
management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
At the end of the day, its not how well your
cloud is organized or how shiny and new it is;

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its about how well [do] the application and

workload perform together.
While matching the application and load
makes sense, the elastic nature of the hybrid
cloud environment offers opportunities
for continual refinement of where they are
deployed, according to David Langlais, Hewlett
Packard Enterprises senior director of cloud
and automation.
Like a swinging pendulum, a certain amount
of back-and-forth between private and public
clouds is natural, he said. Whats important is
to design applications in a way that can handle
changing deployment models, all the way down
to managing the data and connecting to it, he
explained. Decisions that are made initially
on the development side have to be handled
in production for the long term. It also means
understanding the cost profile and recalculating
on a regular basis. Joel Shore

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Theres a lot of noise about the superiority

of both hybrid cloud and public cloud deployments. So which is it? Is internal IT infrastructure destined to extinction under a wave
of public utility computing, or is public cloud
a fad at the peak of inflated expectations set
to crumble beneath the realities of real-world
cost, integration and data protection?
Most likely, neither of these extreme positions will prevail, at least in the near term. So
IT teams face decisions about when, where and
how to deploy public and private cloud. They
must also try to make public and private work
well together while consistently managing
workloads, security and configurations.
Traditional enterprise data centers provide
maximal control and flexibility over all aspects
of hardware, software and system administration at the cost of capital expenditures (such
as facilities and equipment) and operating
expenditures (such as utilities, staffing and

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support contracts). The move to completely

shared services eliminates most of these overhead costs by presenting users with a set of
virtually abstracted infrastructure and application services that are bought and paid for
as needed. As IDC Research advises, assessing on-premises versus cloud requires considering the enterprises complexity and breadth
of resources compared with those offered by a
cloud provider.
Using a public cloud means ceding control
over operational details, but it doesnt imply
taking undue risks. Contrary to the early conventional wisdom and fear sown by other vendors, the core infrastructure of public clouds
is almost always more secure than enterprise
data centers. Consider the highest profile data
breaches in recent memoryincidents such
as the Edward Snowden leak of NSA documents, Target and Home Depot point-ofsale breaches and the hack of Sony Pictures

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Entertainmentalmost all were against private

infrastructure.
Although shared cloud services present a
big target, providers have powerful business
and regulatory incentives to maximize security by using the latest technology, disciplined
processes and thorough audits. Still, there are
good reasons for keeping some applications
and their associated data and infrastructure
in-house. Migrating legacy applications can be
difficult, with their myriad dependencies on
internal data sources and deep integration to
existing and stable business processes.
Here are three ways to approach the makeversus-buy choice:
Start private by evolving virtual machine (VM)
farms into a cloud; add public for new or highly

The most common scenario

for larger organizations that have already virtualized most, if not all of their applications,
is to evolve from server VMs to full private
cloud. According to the National Institute
of Standards and Technologys definition of
cloud computing, the evolution means adding
self-service provisioning on demand, resource
variable workloads.

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pooling across users and organizations,

dynamic workload elasticity and scalability,
and metered service with resources tracked and
billed based on workload consumption.
Workloads targeting customers or external
business partners that are highly variable, seasonal or have few integration points with internal systems may be better served by running on
a public cloud. Migrating these is the first stage
of hybridization.
This is
the path primarily taken by startups or small
and medium-sized businesses, because some
organizations may not have the capital or personnel available to build a private cloud. These
organizations are some of the most aggressive
users of infrastructure as a service and software
as a service, preferring to outsource backend
IT and focus on developing applications and
services that fuel new business. Although its
impossible for such organizations to actually
outgrow Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google, its possible for usage to
outstrip their budgets.
Once companies find that their AWS bill

Start public and add private if necessary.

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is well into five figures per month, its time

to pull workloads with the highest sustained
demand in-house. If a business is using Azure,
this is relatively simple because the service
model and management interface is nearly
identical between public and private clouds.
Things are trickier for AWS or Google users;
however, both OpenStack and Apache CloudStack provide AWS API compatibility to minimize workload reconfiguration and simplify the
transition.

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Make new workloads all public and maintain

legacy applications as they are. Research

company Gartner proposes another, separatebut-equal cloud deployment model it calls

Bimodal IT that segments services into categories based on application service requirements,
criticality, maturity and level of integration
with existing business processes. As defined
by Gartner, Mode one is traditional,

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emphasizing scalability, efficiency, safety and

accuracy. Mode two is nonsequential, emphasizing agility and speed.
In practice, this means putting legacy applications into maintenance modewhich could
require years of supportand where investments focus on security, reliability and maintaining performance. Meanwhile, new systems
are cloud native and built with public cloud
services and APIs.
Choosing a cloud deployment model starts
with understanding your application portfolio
and its specific needs. Use public cloud where
you can, on-premises where you must and
develop the wisdom and expertise required to
integrate the two. Whether you start a private
or public cloud, most organizations will likely
end up with a mix of the two. The key is to find
the right balance and minimize the friction of
moving workloads between clouds.

Kurt Marko

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Conversations about cloud services

often begin with Amazon Web Services, but
for most organizations, it wont end there. An
increasing number are adopting multicloud
strategies that include both public and private
components to fight vendor lock-in, increase
the diversity of available services, counter arbitrage price disparities or maintain control over
particularly sensitive information. Although
using multiple cloud computing platforms can
be a sound strategy, it can lead to application,
API and configuration management problems.
It can be complex to manage applications
and infrastructure configurations across cloud
stacks that dont share a common API and
have very different service definitions and billing models. Its hardly a showstopper, however, because a number of mature software and
software as a service (SaaS) options are available to automate deployments across a variety
of cloud stacks. Yet all automation tools rely

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on a common conceptual framework: treating

cloud resources as abstract objects that can be
configured, run and managed as software code.
Hence, theres an overlap with DevOps methodologies and organizational models.

THE MULTICLOUD IMPERATIVE

If you think using multiple cloud computing

platforms works only for hyper growth cloudnative startups or multinational enterprises,
think again. Fifty-eight percent of respondents
to a RightScale report on the cloud use both
public and private clouds. Furthermore, 14%
have a multiple public-cloud strategy with
another 55% working toward a hybrid mix of
public and private. Lest you dismiss RightScale,
a provider of cloud management software, of
stacking the deck in favor of its product thesis,
Forrester Research came up with similar data.
The market research company found that 52%

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of large firms already use more than one public

cloud vendor, with a third running on three or
more cloud computing platforms.
The multicloud imperative is fairly simple.
No organization wants to have critical infrastructure solely dependent on a single vendor,
even one as large and reliable as Amazon Web
Services (AWS). Indeed, without a proper AWS
architecture that includes multiple availability zones, outages are a very real possibility as
Amazon and others have found.
Yet, as Forrester points out, cloud heterogeneity is causing angst among IT pros. Multivendor hybrid cloud models require decisions
about how to manage different cloud computing platforms to provide consistent experience to developers and business users of
cloud applications. Inconsistent management
and monitoring interfaces are particularly
frustrating.
Indeed, RightScales survey found that a
quarter of respondents say managing multiple cloud computing platforms is a significant challenge. Digging deeper, Forresters data
shows the biggest issues in managing multiple clouds are service consistency among

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providers, workload migration among clouds,

consolidating management across multiple
clouds and supporting different cloud end-user
portals. Cloud-agnostic deployment software
can help with all four.

CLOUD-AGNOSTIC MANAGEMENT OPTIONS

Dozens of products are designed to automate

infrastructure and application management
across multiple clouds. Some focus on specific
needs or usage scenarios. For example, Cloudyn
is designed for asset and cost management and
includes a workload optimizer to identify the
most efficient cost-performance deployment
option for a particular workload. Meanwhile,
Computer Services Corp.using the former
ServiceMesh productfocuses on cloud governance, security and lifecycle management.
Others, such as Cliqr, Cloudify and ElasticBox
take an application-centric approach to cloud
automation.
The most popular multicloud products are
generally those used by organizations embracing a DevOps approach to cloud management, a
method that extends application programming

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into the realm of infrastructure configuration

and management. Indeed, an important differentiator of each tool is its choice of programming language.
RightScale is on most peoples short list
for cloud automation; however, its own survey found that the most commonly used infrastructure DevOps tools are Chef, Puppet,
Ansible and SaltStack.
Befitting its name, Chef turns infrastructure
configuration, deployment and management
into a set of recipes that can be interpreted by
any system running the Chef client. Of course,
there is some server complexity behind the
scenes, but Chef can manage all parts of a cloud
application deployment and can be run within
the cloud itself. In other words, the Chef server,
developer workstations, system nodes and analytics engine all can run as infrastructure as
a service. Chef supports the major cloud services including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google,
VMware and IBM Softlayer, as well as IBM
SmartCloud Orchestrator and OpenStack.
Puppet is referred to as the granddaddy of
orchestration software, and its both mature
and widely supported. Puppet has a class-based

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domain specific language that resembles

JavaScript Open Notation. Although it has a
Web user interface (UI), advanced configurations will require programming and using

When picking an automation

tool, consider the sophistication
and scale of your infrastructure
and the expertise of your IT
or DevOps team.
the command-line interface. Razor, a newly
released tool from Puppet, can auto-discover
and inventory infrastructure and dynamically
select a preferred system image for bare-metal
provisioning.
An open source platform whose commercial version was recently acquired by Red Hat,
Ansible doesnt require a software agent; it
operates completely via secure-shell connections. Ansible uses YAML for its configuration
playbooks, which are used for system configuration, deployment and orchestration.
A relatively new platform that focuses on
speed and scalability, SaltStack is available both

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as an open source code and a supported enterprise edition. SaltStack uses YAML to describe
system states; however, the entire platform
includes a complex set of components that
means a steep learning curve, particularly for
those not already familiar with another automation platform.

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RECOMMENDATIONS AND USES

Any of the major automation platforms

described here will work on both private infrastructure and the major public clouds, but the
integration details will vary widely.
The choice of product should be dictated

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by the sophistication and scale of a companys infrastructure and the expertise of the IT
or DevOps team. Packaged SaaS products like
Dell Cloud Manager, RightScale or Scalr are
the easiest to deploy and operate because they
all have comprehensive Web UIs with prebuilt
templates and integrations to the major cloud
services, although connecting them to internal infrastructure may be trickier. Of the more
general-purpose tools, Puppet is the most
mature, making it quite popular with large
enterprises. But because of its agentless design
and simple YAML syntax, Ansible is probably
the easiest to implement and learn.
Kurt Marko

ABOUT
THE
AUTHORS

JOEL SHORE is a technology journalist, author and editor

with nearly 30 years of experience.He is the co-founder

and longtime director of the Computer Reseller News Test
Center. He is a news writer for SearchCloudApplications.
Email him at jshore@techtarget.com.
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KURT MARKO is

an engineer and technologist whose experience ranges from sub-micron transistors to Web-scale
infrastructure. He now applies the knowledge and skills
from a 20+ year career in research and development and
IT architecture to analysis, consulting and communications. Email him at kurt.marko@gmail.com, and follow
him on Twitter: @krmarko.

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