This comprehensive guide covers the use of services from multiple cloud vendors, including the benefits businesses gain and the challenges IT teams face when using multicloud.
Over a decade after the launch of Amazon Web Services, Amazon continues to benefit from the "first mover" position. While AWS is still the market leader, cloud services from other industry titans such as Google or Microsoft have increased in popularity (as have specialized services from other vendors), preventing Amazon from having hegemonic control of the cloud market.
As a result, organizations and developers are utilizing cloud services from multiple vendors, leading to the aptly-named paradigm of multicloud.
TechRepublic's cheat sheet to multicloud is an introduction to using multiple cloud providers. This guide that will be updated as new integrations and services become available. It is also available as a download, Multicloud: A cheat sheet (free PDF).
Multicloud refers to the practice of using services from multiple heterogeneous cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure, as well as specialized platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Multicloud also comprises the use of private cloud environments and hybrid cloud environments that leverage more than one public cloud platform.
As an architectural choice, multicloud can be used for a variety of reasons--the most obvious one is disaster recovery: While cloud vendors offer a variety of options and SLAs for redundancy to guarantee uptime and backups to ensure data integrity, both of these rely on the supposition that the vendor's entire infrastructure does not fail at once.
While most workloads can be built to be vendor neutral (this flexibility is a primary benefit of multicloud), some workloads may benefit from using specific cloud platforms. For example, apps that use Alexa Skills are better served by using Amazon Web Services, as the APIs involved are native to AWS. Likewise, supported languages and depth of ability for natural language processing varies widely between different cloud providers.
Roughly one third of the IT professionals surveyed in TechRepublic Premium's Managing the multicloud survey indicated their organization uses a specialized application or solutions provider, such as Google Drive, Salesforce, or Cloudflare. These are closer to services than they are cloud platforms—while there is feature duplication between these and similar companies as with public cloud, these products do not support general compute workloads commonly associated with cloud computing.
Multicloud's main advantage is that organizations and application developers can pick and choose components from multiple vendors and use the best fit for their intended purpose. To draw a comparison, multicloud is more à la carte than table d'hôte.
For organizations with an outsized dependency on the Windows ecosystem, leveraging some Microsoft Azure services may be beneficial, while the same organization may use Google Cloud for machine learning and analytics and/or Amazon for public-facing web services.
Industry cloud service providers, such as Dell Boomi, offer cloud-focused digital transformation and data management services for targeted industries (e.g.
