Building multicloud applications is a good strategy for optimizing performance, enhancing resilience, and mitigating risks. However, despite its growing importance, there is so much confusion surrounding multicloud techniques and strategies. This gap in knowledge can lead to confusion for engineering teams ready to take the next steps. In this blog, let’s debunk four common myths about building multicloud applications, shedding light on the realities and benefits of this approach.
Myth: Multicloud is Only for Redundancy
Multicloud architecture offers more than redundancy; it also provides flexibility and optimization. While redundancy is undoubtedly a crucial aspect of multicloud (you can distribute your workloads across multiple clouds for higher availability and disaster recovery), it's not the sole reason for its adoption. Multicloud enables organizations to leverage the strengths of different cloud providers, optimizing performance, cost, and compliance. By strategically distributing workloads across multiple clouds, organizations can achieve greater agility, scalability, and geographic reach.
Let’s look at an example. Imagine a global e-commerce company that relies heavily on high-quality images to showcase its products and deliver a seamless shopping experience to its customers. This company, let's call it VivaShop, has a vast catalog of products ranging from clothing and accessories to electronics and home goods. To optimize both performance and scalability, VivaShop leverages Akamai for edge computing while utilizing AWS for compute-intensive tasks like image processing. Here's how VivaShop strategically utilizes a multicloud solution using both Akamai and AWS:
VivaShop leverages Akamai's EdgeWorkers, an edge computing platform that allows developers to execute lightweight JavaScript code at the edge of Akamai's content delivery network (CDN). By deploying EdgeWorkers at Akamai's edge locations worldwide, VivaShop can bring computing resources closer to its end-users, reducing latency and improving performance. VivaShop utilizes EdgeWorkers to dynamically resize and optimize images on the fly. When a user requests an image from VivaShop's website or mobile app, EdgeWorkers intercepts the request at the edge, retrieves the original image from the origin server, and applies optimizations such as resizing, compression, and format conversion based on the user's device and network conditions. By offloading image processing tasks to Akamai's edge servers, VivaShop significantly reduces the load on its origin servers and accelerates content delivery to end-users. This not only improves the user experience by delivering optimized images quickly but also reduces bandwidth costs and server load, leading to cost savings and scalability benefits.
For compute-intensive tasks like advanced image processing and analysis, VivaShop leverages the computational power and scalability of AWS. AWS offers a wide range of services and tools specifically designed for tasks such as image recognition, object detection, and content analysis. When VivaShop needs to perform complex image processing tasks, such as identifying product attributes, detecting objects within images, or generating product recommendations based on visual data, it utilizes AWS services like Amazon Rekognition and Amazon SageMaker. These AWS services enable VivaShop to process large volumes of images efficiently, extract valuable insights from visual data, and deliver personalized experiences to its customers. With AWS's elastic scaling capabilities, VivaShop can handle spikes in image processing demand during peak shopping seasons without worrying about provisioning and managing infrastructure.
By strategically leveraging Akamai for edge computing and AWS for compute-intensive tasks like image processing, VivaShop achieves the best of both worlds: enhanced performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. Akamai's EdgeWorkers bring computing resources closer to end-users, optimizing content delivery and reducing latency, while AWS provides the computational power and scalability needed for complex image processing tasks. Together, these two platforms enable VivaShop to deliver a seamless and personalized shopping experience to its global customer base.
Myth: Multicloud Increases Complexity
While it's true that managing multiple cloud environments can pose challenges, modern tools and best practices can help mitigate complexity. Open-source technologies like Kubernetes and Jenkins help reduce complexities. Kubernetes provides a unified orchestration layer, allowing organizations to manage workloads across diverse cloud environments seamlessly. Additionally, open source CI/CD automation tools like Jenkins, streamline deployment and operations, reducing the overhead associated with multicloud architectures.
For example, let’s say there is a company called CloudNova which is a rapidly growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider offering a range of cloud-based applications. To manage its expanding infrastructure efficiently and reduce complexity, CloudNova leverages Kubernetes for container orchestration and Jenkins for CI/CD automation.
CloudNova adopts Kubernetes as its container-to-orchestration platform to manage and scale its containerized workloads seamlessly. With Kubernetes, CloudNova can deploy microservices-based applications as Docker containers, ensuring consistency and portability across development, testing, and production environments. Kubernetes abstracts away the underlying infrastructure complexity, allowing developers to focus on application logic rather than infrastructure management. CloudNova also leverages Kubernetes features such as service discovery, load balancing, auto-scaling, and self-healing to ensure high availability and reliability of its applications. Kubernetes' declarative approach to configuration management simplifies deployment workflows and enables rapid iteration and experimentation.
To streamline development and deployment processes, CloudNova uses Jenkins. Using Jenkins for CI/CD automation in a multicloud environment offers several benefits. Let’s go through them. Most importantly, Jenkins is highly customizable and supports a wide range of plugins, making it adaptable to different cloud environments and tools. In a multicloud setup where you might have different requirements or preferences for each cloud provider, Jenkins can be configured accordingly. Jenkins integrates with various cloud platforms, version control systems (like Git), and other tools commonly used in multicloud environments. This integration streamlines the CI/CD pipeline and allows for smooth interaction between different services and platforms.
Another benefit of using Jenkins in multicloud applications is that multicloud applications often require scalability to handle varying workloads and traffic across different cloud providers. Jenkins can be configured to scale horizontally to accommodate increased demand, ensuring efficient CI/CD processes even in dynamic multicloud environments. Jenkins also provides detailed insights into the CI/CD pipeline, including build statuses, test results, and deployment progress. This visibility is crucial in a multicloud setup where resources are distributed across different platforms, enabling teams to monitor and manage the entire process effectively. With Jenkins, you can define consistent CI/CD workflows across multiple cloud environments, ensuring that development, testing, and deployment processes remain standardized regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This consistency improves collaboration and reduces the likelihood of discrepancies or compatibility issues between cloud providers.
By combining Kubernetes for container orchestration and Jenkins for CI/CD automation, CloudNova simplifies its operations, reduces manual effort, and enhances observability and scalability. Kubernetes abstracts away the complexities of managing containerized workloads, while Jenkins enables consistent CI/CD workflows across multiple cloud environments.
Myth: Multicloud is More Expensive
Multicloud strategies can lead to cost savings through workload optimization. For instance, a media streaming platform might utilize Akamai Cloud Computing for networking and Google Cloud's AI and ML services for content recommendation algorithms, optimizing costs while improving user experience.
One way that media streaming platforms like Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+ can ensure high availability, low latency, and reliable content delivery is to leverage Akamai Cloud Computing’s robust networking infrastructure. Akamai Cloud Computing's global network of data centers enables streaming platforms to deploy edge servers in strategic locations worldwide, reducing the distance between users and content delivery points. Akamai Cloud Computing's advanced networking features, such as load balancing, content caching, and DDoS protection, further enhance their reliability and security. Streaming platforms can also utilize Akamai Cloud Computing's cost-effective pricing model and predictable billing structure to optimize networking costs while ensuring consistent performance and uptime. They also offer a transparent pricing and pay-as-you-go model, and they can scale its networking infrastructure dynamically based on actual usage and demand patterns, avoiding over-provisioning and unnecessary expenses.
Food delivery applications can also use GCP’s AI and ML Services for restaurant and food Recommendation Algorithms to suggest relevant and personalized food options to each user. By leveraging Google Cloud's AI and ML services, streaming platforms can optimize costs by paying only for the resources consumed during model training and inference, without the overhead of maintaining on-premises hardware or infrastructure.
Through the strategic combination of Akamai Cloud Computing for networking and Google Cloud's AI and ML services for content recommendation algorithms, streaming platforms and food delivery applications can achieve cost optimization and enhance user experience simultaneously. By leveraging Akamai Cloud Computing's reliable and cost-effective networking infrastructure and Google Cloud's powerful AI and ML capabilities, streaming platforms can deliver high-quality streaming experiences and personalized content recommendations to its global audience, without breaking the bank.
Myth: Security is harder to implement in Multicloud Environments
Let’s face it, implementing security for one cloud provider can be difficult enough, but now we’re adding another one. How do we enhance the security posture, and ensure no threats enter our application? The answer is that we can have a single control plane for adding security protections, allowing for a holistic observability approach for security events. This zero trust model with consistent security policies will help ensure security of your multicloud application.
One of the ways to effectively manage your security in multicloud environments is through consistent policies. These security policies can be implemented with Akamai's global edge platform. Akamai's edge servers are distributed globally, enabling developers to deploy security controls closer to end-users (and closer to bad actors and threats).
Another security concern for multicloud applications is to achieve high availability for your workloads. Akamai safeguards multicloud applications from both high demand and targeted attacks that seek to disrupt workload or application availability. Additionally, it implements security measures by concealing your origin cloud infrastructure, preventing direct access.
Akamai also offers a unified management platform and automation tooling that provides developers with granular visibility into security events, compliance status, and policy enforcement across all workloads. This centralized approach streamlines security management, simplifies compliance auditing, and enables consistent security enforcement, reducing operational overhead and complexity in a multicloud setup. There is no need to manage the individual security solutions (firewalls, DDoS protection) for each cloud provider, which all work differently and require different configuration settings. You have one place with all of the security you need.
From global edge security to scalability, and centralized visibility, Akamai's security solutions offer comprehensive capabilities that are essential for securing multicloud architectures effectively. By incorporating Akamai into your multicloud strategy, you can strengthen your security posture, mitigate risks, and ensure the resilience and compliance of your multicloud applications.
The diagram above shows how Akamai security works in a multicloud setup. On the bottom, you see the cloud providers and their various components, along with a data center. In this hybrid cloud model, each component is made up of its own services and requires security. Instead of adding security components to each component, you have one unified layer of edge security.
It’s a centrally-managed, cloud-agnostic solution that makes it easier to manage security for multicloud applications. These security policies can be easily managed through a wide variety of DevSecOps-first solutions such as Infrastructure as Code tooling and SDKs.
Conclusion
The journey to building multicloud applications is undoubtedly marked by challenges, but the rewards are unparalleled. Multicloud architecture empowers organizations to harness the best of multiple cloud platforms, optimizing performance, costs, and compliance. By strategically distributing workloads across diverse clouds and leveraging open-source technologies like Kubernetes and Jenkins, businesses can streamline operations and unlock new levels of observability and scalability.
Moreover, embracing a multicloud strategy isn't just about maximizing efficiency—it's about fortifying security and resilience. Integrating Akamai into your multicloud approach adds an extra layer of protection, ensuring that your applications remain robust, compliant, and protected against evolving threats.
Thanks for reading! As you continue on your multicloud journey, please feel free to reach out to me with questions! For all things cloud, follow me by clicking the follow button at the top of this page, subscribe to my newsletter below, and follow me on Twitter!
