Do’s and Don’ts of Multicloud

Do’s and don’ts of multicloud from the Google Cloud Blog:

Do: Use services from each public cloud because of their differentiated services or to handle regulatory reasons, existing business relationships, and accommodating mergers and acquisitions. If you acquire a company that uses another cloud, it’s usually expensive and difficult to consolidate. It can be smarter to stay put.

Do: Recognize different stakeholder interests and needs. Groups within your organization will come at multicloud from distinct directions. And this may impact your approach 

Do: Ask others what worked, and what didn’t.

Do: Experiment first using techniques like multi-region deployments to surface issues in your support process or toolchain that fail when faced with distributed systems. Start with muti-region deployments and chaos engineering experiments before aggressively jumping into multicloud architectures. 

Do: Embrace the right foundational components, including Kubernetes. Everything will not run on Kubernetes but it also represents the closest thing we have to a multicloud API. 

Don’t fear multicloud.

Don’t: Over-engineer for workload or data portability. Trying to engineer for “write once, run anywhere” can slow you down, and ignores the inherent uniqueness that’s part of each platform such as the per-cloud stickiness of identity management, security features, and even network functionality. Data gravity is still a thing, says James, that causes some to dismiss multicloud outright. If you’re using multiple public clouds, you take advantage of the distinct value each offers. Use native cloud services where possible so that you see the benefits from useful innovations, built-in resilience, and baked-in best practices. The value from that cloud-infused workload may outweigh the benefits of seamless portability.

By using a cloud-based backplane instead of an on-prem one, you’re offloading toil, leveraging managed services for scale and security, and introducing modern practices to the rest of your team. Anthos is a way to build and run distributed Kubernetes fleets in Google Cloud and across clouds.