What is multi-cloud? Multi-cloud is the utilization of two or more public clouds from different cloud providers. This can include any combination of Infrastructure, Platform, or Software as a service.
This also refers to the distribution of cloud assets or software services across multiple cloud-hosting environments. The company can host different components of the application which have different requirements on different cloud service providers.
An example of this, is hosting the front end of an application with one cloud provider and the back end with a different provider because these two aspects have differing hardware needs.
Benefits?
- Reduces the company’s reliance on any single cloud-hosting vendor.
- Access to different cloud services which each best suit different needs.
- Provides a failover solution to protect enterprises from outages.
Drawbacks?
- Using multiple clouds adds additional complexity to your environment.
- You may lack visibility into entire applications and have to switch between multiple cloud provider’s different APIs.
Comparison to a Hybrid Cloud
Multicloud refers to more than one cloud deployment of the same deployment type. Hybrid Clouds occur when a company uses a combination of private and public clouds.
Calnex SNE use cases
- The Calnex SNE can be used in a multicloud environment to test at what point an application begins to have noticeable issues while increasing impairments. This can be used to test which cloud providers are located in optimal locations for the end user.
- The multiport function of the SNE can be used to test the failover functionality built within multicloud architectures. All the packets on a link to a specific cloud provider can be dropped to see if the network appropriately responds by rerouting the traffic to a separate cloud service.
- To test the load balancing aspect of running one application across multiple different cloud providers. If impairments are increased on one link the Multicloud router should appropriately balance the traffic on the other links depending on the use case.
- Microservices can be deployed using a multi-cloud environment. Test the effects on the service behavior by emulating the different cloud infrastructures with different levels of network impairment.
Brandon Frech Applications Engineer
Related Calnex product: Calnex SNE
