Digital transformation and the adoption of new technologies like AI requires flexible, secure, and scalable infrastructures. Increasingly, organizations must turn to an agnostic multi-cloud approach.
Many technology organizations have started their journey towards digital transformation. Leading cloud providers offer attractive offers and built-in features to attract clients and support their business requirements. It is crucial to build an agnostic cloud infrastructure so that an organization can pick and choose cloud providers that offer the required features in a cost-friendly manner. Such an agnostic platform not only helps to save on cloud cost spending but also adapts the best cloud provider frameworks to meet business requirements.
What is an Agnostic Cloud Platform?
A cloud-agnostic platform will operate independently with any cloud provider without any dependencies from a particular vendor and their lock-in. Depending on your business requirements and ability to move across different cloud environments without any operational impacts, you can choose and incorporate the best vendor features into your cloud infrastructure. This can refer to public, private, or hybrid cloud platforms.
Key features to look for in such a cloud platform include:
Architecture: A decoupled architecture should be in place to reduce dependencies between services and ensure no component is tied to a specific provider. Leverage service meshes for different patterns of communication across multi-cloud environments.
Consistent IaC: Using a multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC) provider helps provision cloud resources consistently and version-controlled. Many IaC providers currently support multi-cloud deployments, and we can quickly adapt their built-in features.
CI/CD Pipelines: Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines help build and deploy software into a cloud environment. We must design this framework to support any cloud environment, enabling seamless deployment across different platforms.
Monitoring and Observability: Observability tools should give a detailed view of all infra changes across the environment. They primarily focus on system performance, security, and operations. We need to integrate the best tools available in the market into this framework without any issues.
Security: Security policies and standards (controls) should be uniform across all providers. Leverage federated identity and access management solutions to ensure consistency in security across different environments. While framing, consider access controls, data encryption, identity and access management, incident response and reporting, compliance and auditing, and data classification and controls.
See also: Cloud Computing is Ready for AI, Is Your Data?
Agnostic Cloud Implementation Strategies
Once providers and services are selected based on those criteria, the next step is to implement your plan. Some points to keep in mind when implementing include:
Multi-Cloud Architecture: Adapt a multi-cloud architecture earlier in the game plan. It is optional to plan all together in a single run. Still, while building the platform, we must consider vendor-free tools and technologies and quickly integrate them into the architecture. Earlier is always good to avoid wasting time and money on refactoring at the later stages.
Container Orchestration: Implementation of containerized application deployment helps run the application in a platform-independent environment. The developer can build the code with the necessary coding technology components and make the container. These days, all cloud providers support the deployment of the application only through containers. It will help remove environmental dependencies.
Microservice & APIs: By default, the microservice architecture will support cloud-agnostic features. Each microservice can be independently deployed and scaled to run across multiple clouds. Accessing through APIs will help ensure that all services remain flexible and accessible regardless of the underlying infrastructure. While designing the API layer, we must consider crucial factors like caching, versioning, backward compatibility, data querying, and gateway for cross-cloud communications.
Databases: Use globally distributed database storage, which offers consistent and easy access to all platforms without dependencies. All cloud providers offer good database features that autoscale and replicate across regions. While considering the database design, we must consider a few factors, such as consistency and latency, data residency, and compliance, primarily on the cost of maintaining data to store, transfer, and replications. Many providers are giving managed services, features of which are available and restricted to only restricted cloud providers. We must be cautious and selective when choosing management services.
Governance, Cost Monitoring, and Optimization: Automating policy enforcement for all configurations ensures your infrastructure remains secure and compliant as it expands. FinOps practices should be incorporated early to manage and monitor the cloud cost-effectively. We must define policy management in data governance, resource provisioning, etc. This agnostic framework should perform automated checks on audits and real-time monitoring to identify and remediate non-compliant issues.
Test suites: Incorporate good testing frameworks, which ensure that all the applications and components deployed into the cloud environments are platform-free. If developers introduce any dependencies, they must be captured and corrected early in the implementations in non-prod environments. While designing the test suite framework, we must consider how the regression testing, data management, unit testing, and testing automation tools are supported across cross-cloud environments.
Network & Security: Connecting different cloud environments requires standard networking and security patterns. Leverage service mesh technologies, which offer cloud-agnostic connectivity features by default and help streamline networking in multi-cloud environments. Hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity can be established using VPNs, direct interconnections, or virtual private cloud peering. Consider the load-balancing traffic distribution across services in the cloud environments. It needs to be highly available, with good-performing routing logic in place.
Tools: Use cloud-agnostic tools designed to be implemented seamlessly across different cloud providers. These tools will help build containers, deploy infrastructure components into cloud environments, monitor network and system performances, and send alerts and notifications to maintain config changes systematically. Adapting systematic tools and design enables developers to help their software develop seamlessly without considering the underlying infrastructure. They can focus only on the business logic to incorporate without considering cloud infrastructure deployments.
A Final Word on Agnostic Cloud Platforms
Building a multi-cloud agnostic platform requires good, solid planning and frameworks. Once implemented, we can leverage the power of the cloud provider’s built-in technologies and features. While framing the cloud infrastructure, the framework must consider its standardization, neutral tools, adaptability, and all governance practices to ensure performance, security, and compliance across multiple clouds. Security must remain a top consideration by following zero-trust models and centralized identity management.
By following these key implementation strategies and practices, we can build scalable, secure cloud-agnostic environments. This requires lots of planning from architects and developers to design the applications to support all cloud environment infrastructures. Good testing suits should be in place to test and certify the changes across environments.
