As cloud computing continues to evolve, businesses have access to more options than ever before. Two popular cloud strategies are multi-cloud and multi-location cloud. However, a supercloud has emerged that takes these concepts to the next level.
In this blog, we’ll explore how supercloud compares to multi-cloud and single-vendor but multi-location cloud solutions and examine the challenges and benefits of each approach.
Multi-Cloud
Multi-cloud refers to the use of two or more cloud computing services from different providers. The main benefit of multi-cloud is its ability to provide greater flexibility, allowing businesses to choose the cloud providers that best meet their needs. This strategy also helps to reduce vendor lock-in and provides redundancy in case of service outages.
Managing multiple cloud providers can be a challenging and costly task for businesses. One of the main challenges teams face is that each cloud provider has its own unique APIs, management tools, and pricing structures. This means that businesses must be familiar with each provider’s platform and invest time and resources into managing multiple environments simultaneously.
Before deploying to a multi-cloud solution, teams will have to make a decision as to the “best” clouds and cloud locations in which to deploy their appliciation/s. Usually, these decisions are made in a largely arbitrary or best-guess fashion hoping to get to the app as close as possible to as many of its users as possible. Invariably this will result in sub-optimal deployment patterns. Additionally, when deployed to these locations, teams will need to pay for and support additional infrastructure which is not always optimized for resource consumption. Servers are rented and maintained in locations even though traffic or user demands do not support the need for this infrastructure at all times. The net result can be bloating hosting costs and unnecessary ops support needs.
The management of a multi-cloud environment requires specialized skills that may not be available in-house. This can result in additional costs as businesses may need to hire specialized staff to manage their multi-cloud environments or train their existing team members to develop the required skills. Furthermore, managing multiple providers may result in increased complexity and additional operational overhead, such as setting up monitoring and alerting across multiple clouds, ensuring security and compliance across all environments, creating a consistent application deployment pattern, and managing data storage and retrieval.
The pricing structures of different cloud providers can also vary widely. Each cloud provider has different pricing models, which can make it challenging to compare costs across providers. Businesses must be mindful of their usage and the associated costs, such as storage, data transfer, and compute resources, across all their cloud providers to avoid unexpected bills.
However, despite these challenges, businesses are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud approach due to the many benefits it offers, such as increased redundancy, improved resilience, and greater flexibility in terms of choosing the best cloud providers for their specific needs. As a result, many businesses are exploring new technologies such as supercloud to simplify the management of their multi-cloud environments and reduce the associated complexity and costs.
Single Vendor Multi-Location
Multi-location cloud refers to the use of cloud computing services in different geographic locations. This approach is popular for businesses that need to serve customers in different regions or comply with data residency requirements. Multi-location cloud also provides redundancy in case of natural disasters or other service disruptions to a specific cloud location. Multi-location Single provider solutions are significantly less complex than multi-cloud solutions but do not carry the same provider redundancy, location accessibility, or supplier diversification benefits.
Managing infrastructure across multiple locations can still be complex and challenging for businesses. It requires specialized skills and expertise to ensure that the application is properly deployed, configured, secured, and maintained in each location. Some cloud providers help with tooling to assist but teams will ultimately be responsible for their application consistency or potentially give themselves over entirely to vendor lock-in by tooling against the proprietary systems of the cloud provider.
The same location selection and an “always on” costs exist with single vendor multi-location as for multi-cloud. Teams will still have to make largely arbitrary selections as to the “best” locations to run their applications and will necessarily need to have those locations “always on “ and consuming resources (and hence driving up hosting costs).
Supercloud
Supercloud is a new approach to cloud computing that combines the benefits of multi-cloud and multi-location cloud and adds a layer of selection intelligence to provide the benefits of multiple locations and multiple vendors without the team and management costs nor the location selection or “always on” costs.
Supercloud provides businesses with the ability to use multiple cloud providers in multiple locations, all managed through a single interface that chooses the best location for an application based on user and application needs. This approach offers the best of both worlds, providing greater flexibility and redundancy while simplifying management.
Supercloud achieves this through the use of cloud orchestration tools that automate the deployment and management of applications to infrastructure across multiple clouds and locations. These tools provide businesses with a unified view of their application and cloud infrastructure, making it easier to manage resources, monitor performance, and control costs.
Benefits of Supercloud
Supercloud provides several benefits over traditional multi-cloud and multi-location cloud strategies, including:
Greater Flexibility
Supercloud allows businesses to use multiple cloud providers and locations, providing greater flexibility to meet their specific needs.
Improved Resilience
Supercloud provides redundancy across multiple clouds and locations, reducing the risk of service outages.
Simplified Management
Supercloud automates the deployment and management of infrastructure, reducing complexity and simplifying management.
Cost Optimization
Supercloud provides an automated optimization routine across all the compute and providers which means the application will run and consume resources only at the right place and scale at the right time to meet the needs and requirements of both the application teams and their users.
Webscale CloudFlow: Supercloud Simplicity-as-a-Service
Supercloud
Simplicity-as-a-Service
The CloudFlow platform automates the orchestration of custom workloads, apps and APIs across a mesh network of private and public cloud providers.
We have created CloudFlow so you can harness the power of distributed, multicloud computing without the operational chaos that is traditionally involved with managing such a complex infrastructure network.
Conclusion
While each of the above approaches has clear benefits and challenges, supercloud provides businesses with greater flexibility, improved resilience, simplified management, and cost optimization. As cloud computing continues to evolve, supercloud is poised to become a popular strategy for businesses of all sizes.
