Multicloud Architecture Migration and Security

Chapter 2. Multicloud Infrastructure Orchestration and Management

In an ideal world, IT teams would have a completely heterogeneous environment in which to deploy their entire infrastructure. Reality can be quite different. An organization could have a legacy system that is difficult to maintain or could be out of compliance with current standards.

Deploying new applications in a multicloud environment can create infrastructure management problems because each cloud provider has a different management interface that requires different mechanisms for access. One way to ease these challenges is to use containers across all cloud providers. Those of you with a security background will read that and think, “Wait, containers are just a fancy way of saying virtual machine (VM), right?”

Not exactly. Although VMs and containers share many similarities, there are some key differences. Containers are isolated systems designed to be platform agnostic. But unlike VMs, a container image does not have a full operating system (OS). Instead, it uses extensions from the kernel of the host OS in order to run a specific application or function. Hence, a container mediates what an application does with an OS.

This means that container images are both smaller and more purpose driven than VMs. A container image might run MySQL or Apache, and multiple container images can live on a host OS. This allows for isolation of one application from another and it enables organizations to easily redeploy an application ...