A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration

Chapter 8. Higher-Order Architectures for Multi-Cloud

Poonam Lamba, Cloud Customer Engineer, and Patrick Sheehan, Enterprise Cloud Architect

Who

• CxOs

• Technical Leads

Why

Companies adopt hybrid cloud—with at least one private and one shared cloud instance—as well as multi-cloud positions for a multitude of reasons. For some, large capital investments that have yet to reach maturity (i.e., have incurred “technical debt”) may dictate a measured, phased approach to cloud adoption. For others, favorable feature sets may compel them to deploy in a multitude of cloud platforms, allowing them to achieve “best in breed” goals. Regulatory and compliance requirements such as GDPR may limit the locations where information may be sourced and stored and hence could be a driver for multi-cloud as well. Personnel may also dictate their adoption strategies—for example, models where development teams have autonomy to choose their preferred frameworks and platforms. Regardless of their reasons, many companies today are approaching the cloud as a broad fabric of services from which they can pick and choose those that best suit their needs, much like a “services buffet.”

In this essay, we discuss the primary considerations for hybrid and/or multi-cloud adoption. Going “all in” on public cloud—that is, “cloud first/native”—is a great choice for new or smaller/nimbler organizations, but most, if not all, medium-to-large enterprises are adopting hybrid or multi-cloud strategies.

Hybrid cloud ...