Multi Cloud For Dummies 9781119419464

Multi-Cloud
Hedvig Special Edition
by Allan Konar
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Introduction
O
ver the last several years, enterprises have
undergone a digital transformation of their busi-
nesses. These changes require flexibility that
traditional infrastructures cant easily support.
To meet these challenges, the journey to the cloud is

underway. Cloud offerings free business from the con-
straints of constantly expanding their infrastructure to
speed growth. Market efficiencies, economics, and tech-
nology have advanced to the point where most mid-to-
large organizations leverage a mix of public and private
clouds.
Architects and decision makers have pursued a hybrid-

and multi-cloud strategy. This has led to a dramatic
fragmentation of systems.
What if you could overcome these limitations? What if

there was a solution that managed data across any cloud?
About This Book

Software-defined storage (SDS) has evolved to provide
a solution to data portability. It can be deployed as a
Universal Data Plane (UDP) to overcome the rigidity and
economics of traditional storage. It provides a single,
1
programmable data management layer that replaces the
need for disparate SAN, NAS, object, cloud, backup, repli-
cation, and data protection gear. It can be run on com-
modity servers in private clouds and as instances in public
clouds.
Icons Used in the Book

Those little pictures that pop up from time to time in the
margins of this book are there to ring a bell or set off that
lightbulb above your head. Here are the ones youll find
in this book.
If, like Steven Wright, you often suffer amne-

sia and dj vu at the same time (you think
youve forgotten this before), dont worry;
well point out what you need to remember!
Next to this icon is a helpful hint based on

our experience so you can profit from our
experience.
Some people like to dive into bits and bytes

like Scrooge McDuck and his money. If thats
you, then check out the text near this icon.
Danger, Will Robinson!
2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Looking at market demands
Acknowledging DevOps
Seeking multiple clouds
Chapter 1
Multi-Cloud Drivers
D
igital transformation represents the drive to use
technology to find better ways to engage with
customers and maximize efficiencies, blurring
the line between the digital and physical worlds.
Consumers expect more faster and better. Companies

are looking to find new ways to attract, retain, and engage
their customers by enabling interactions among people,
businesses, and things. This involves investment in new
skills, infrastructure, and services to enable greater agil-
ity, innovation, efficiencies, and customer satisfaction.
The IoT (Internet of Things) has introduced embedded

technology and communications capabilities in everyday
3
objects enabling them to interact without human
intervention.
Big data and AI (artificial intelligence) drive

meaningful engagement by identifying and
taking advantage of usage trends.
How Time to Market Is

Driving the Market
User demand is driving a change in the application land-
scape. Users expect to access their apps, services, and
data anywhere on any device.
Further, they expect new features, automation and inte-

grations at an accelerating pace. New, modern, respon-
sive apps are the norm.
Iterative and incremental (agile) software development

methodologies have replaced the traditional sequential,
noniterative (waterfall) design process, enabling faster
time-to-market.
Whereas the traditional waterfall methodol-

ogy treats analysis, design, development, and
QA as discrete phases in a software project,
agile development sees these as continuous
activities.
4
DevOps Is King
Traditional IT is typically a pure support function.
Theyre the folks you went to when you needed a new
computer or your email wasnt working. Developers
depended on them to maintain critical infrastructure.
That was, until developers needed what traditional IT
wasnt tooled to support.
Technology needs to be an enabler. Digital

transformation will fail if technology acts as a
drag. Its all about building self-service infra-
structure for applications and developers.
Enter DevOps. DevOps represents the union of develop-

ment, QA, and IT operations. Agile development is pos-
sible because of the collaboration between development
and IT functions. Equally importantly, automation of
software build and delivery, and infrastructure manage-
ment enable rapid, frequent and reliable application
development, testing, and release.
Further, it empowers employees, leading to greater pro-

ductivity through efficiencies.
A key enabler for DevOps is the availability of cloud

infrastructures.
5
Creating More Agility
Traditional IT infrastructure wasnt designed and built to
support DevOps and the customer-driven economy. It
lacked the agility to respond to the rapid rate-of-change.
The world is going cloud-based. Rather than waiting

weeks or months for infrastructure or service resources
through traditional IT channels, developers are actively
encouraged to use IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and
SaaS (Software as a Service) resources like never before.
The challenge for medium to large enter-

prises will be stitching together private (on-
prem) and public cloud resources across
vendors in support of fiscal and performance
targets.
Multiple Clouds Means

Multiple Silver Linings
Its not uncommon for developers to look to multiple
IaaS vendors driven by hypervisor type, workload type,
location, price, or specific technical requirements like
redundancy and durability guarantees. This mitigates
overreliance on any given vendor.
Bottom line: Its a multi-cloud world.
6
IN THIS CHAPTER
Public, private, and hybrid cloud
Multi-cloud
SDDS to the rescue
Chapter 2
Software-Defined
Data Center Drivers
T
he widespread adoption of virtualization funda-
mentally changed how companies operate.
Virtualization enabled more efficient use of hard-
ware resources by abstracting them from the operating
system, applications, and services. This meant that mul-
tiple operating systems and applications could co-exist
on the same server, reducing IT costs.
Virtualization also enabled cloud computing or the deliv-

ery of services via shared computing resources, software,
infrastructure, and data as an on-demand service.
7
The two are often confused, but the difference is that
cloud-based services often use virtualization be it
hypervisor- or container-based to provide services,
but also enable self-service, elasticity, automated man-
agement, and scaling.
Public Cloud
Public clouds enable vendors to share resources like
applications (for instance, Salesforce), infrastructure (for
instance, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), and storage
(for instance, Microsoft Azure Storage) as a service over
the Internet.
Public clouds are easy to use and have few

barriers to entry because the provider carries
the cost of hardware, software, and band-
width, spreading them over the entirety of its
customer base. Further, public clouds can
scale up at will and provide the promise of
greater resource utilization, because you only
pay for what you use.
Private Cloud
With private cloud computing, the company owns and
operates the hardware and software that provide ser-
vices. These two elements are often composed of the
8
same components and use the same architecture as pub-
lic clouds, but provide dedicated services to business
units or individuals within a single organization.
Private clouds provide greater reliability by protecting

against failures of individual infrastructure components.
As with public clouds, they also enable more efficient uti-
lization of company hardware resources. Further, they
enable the same sort of scalability, automation, and self-
service as public clouds.
Private clouds are often used by businesses, like financial

institutions, with dynamic resource needs that require
direct control over and isolation of their computing envi-
ronments. This means that IT operations are responsible
for the maintenance of private cloud services, which may
not always be tenable. Many organizations look to cloud
providers like Oracle to deploy and provide support for
private cloud infrastructures for them.
Hybrid Cloud
Many organizations combine a mix of private and public
cloud services, creating a hybrid cloud. This means that
they can manage their own private clouds, but enable
scaling through the use of a public cloud.
Often, this means maintaining sensitive data or hosting

critical functions on-prem in a private cloud, while using
third-party public clouds to manage noncritical
9
resources, such as automated testing and QA
infrastructures.
Hybrid clouds are most valuable for organi-

zations with highly dynamic workloads, like
those affected by seasonal spikes. Their
applications could run on their own private
cloud and take advantage of the additional
on-demand resources available from a public
cloud when their demand spikes (cloud
bursting).
Multi-Cloud
No one provider has the right solution for all of a cus-
tomers needs. Its not uncommon for developers to look
multiple IaaS vendors driven by workload or in support of
redundancy to guarantee reliability. This also mitigates
overreliance on any given vendor allowing for greater
flexibility.
Multi-cloud solutions are a superset of hybrid clouds.

That is to say, all hybrid clouds are multi-cloud deploy-
ments, but not all multi-cloud deployments are hybrid
clouds. Multi-cloud architectures represent stitching
together a single service across multiple, physically dis-
tinct public clouds or private clouds if theyre running
different hypervisor or container platforms.
10
There are challenges to multi-cloud solutions; interoper-
ability and data availability chief amongst them.
Software-Defined Data
Center to the Rescue
To fully embrace multi-cloud solutions, its imperative to
ensure applications and data are universally available
across providers. While new container and orchestration
technologies make application portability among clouds
a reality, data portability the ability to move data
seamlessly among different workloads, clouds and tiers
remains a challenge.
Enter SDS (software defined storage) as part of a larger

SDDC (software-defined data center) model.
The SDDC is the bedrock of modern IT. Its a necessity

borne out of two diametrically opposing economics at
play: the expensive, explosive growth of data, and the
immutable, inevitable march of cloud computing.
Software-defined data centers enable you to tame the

costs of exponentially growing data while simultaneously
plugging it into the self-service, automated world of
clouds. SDDCs are implicitly hybrid, elastic, and designed
with self-provisioning as a default requirement. See
Figure2-1.
11
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 2-1:The SDDC stack.
The SDDC is composed of several architec-

tural components, including:
SDN (software defined networking) software-

defined routing and switching, which allows for
network resources and services to go anywhere in
the network unbound from specific hardware
SDS, or software that enables provisioning and

management of virtual pools of SAN, NAS, and
object storage capacity and may span multiple
devices
Software-defined compute, where the computing

hardware is abstracted via virtualization, be it
hypervisor- or container-based
12
Orchestration, which provides the coordination of
automation including provisioning and resource
allocation
Lets All Be Mature

about This
How do you determine the right cloud model? Heres a
quick way to map attributes to three stages of maturity.
See Figure2-2.
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 2-2:The three stages of cloud maturity.
13
Determine your stage by asking yourself:
What percentage of my apps are virtualized?

Do I just have traditional apps like email, or new
apps like Hadoop and NoSQL?
Am I using automation and orchestration tools?

Am I using software-defined compute, network, or
storage infrastructure?
How many, if any, public clouds am I using?
14
IN THIS CHAPTER
Minimizing risk
Reducing on-prem and public
cloud costs
Eliminating downtime
Chapter 3
The Benefits of
Going Multi-Cloud
M
ulti-cloud is driven by selecting the best-in-
class technologies and services from multiple
cloud providers to create the best possible busi-
ness services. Companies can leverage the advantages,
savings, and geographic diversity of choosing from a
variety of available clouds.
This chapter discuses four key benefits of going multi-

cloud. See Figure3-1.
15
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 3-1:The four benefits of going multi-cloud.
Playing It Safe
Avoiding vendor lock-in is key when looking at cloud
solutions. Companies should choose the best fit from
among multiple cloud providers, and insist on the free-
dom to switch at any given time.
By making sure theyre not locked in to a single vendor,

organizations can adapt to strategy changes driven by
industry evolution without having to re-architect their
entire cloud solutions.
An effect of a multi-cloud strategy is that companies

have greater leverage when negotiating with vendors,
allowing them to get better pricing and terms, including
more favorable SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
Reducing On-Prem Costs

Multi-cloud solutions enable the use of commodity
infrastructure, reducing on-prem costs.
16
By offloading services that require special-
ized equipment, organizations can focus on
general-purpose compute resources, in
which pricing is driven by commoditization.
Multi-cloud solutions allow for on-demand allocation of

required resources, enabling companies to rapidly burst
their usage. All hardware, software, and maintenance
costs are carried by the cloud providers, yielding a low-
cost with minimal barriers to entry.
This means that organizations no longer need to over-

provision their infrastructure. In this way, they can
reduce hardware spend and the associated maintenance
costs, which can prove to be significant.
Reducing Public Cloud Costs

By selecting the most cost effective, best-of-breed multi-
cloud services, organizations are able to minimize their
public cloud costs.
Public cloud providers offer a wide range of pricing mod-

els, allowing companies to mix and match. This enables
companies to drive the best performance and compre-
hensive capabilities at the most attractive costs. Trends
like spot instance pricing will continue to drive down
aggregate public cloud costs by allowing users to move
workloads between providers based on time-of-day
pricing.
17
Spot instance pricing allows customers to bid
on a vendors unused compute capacity at a
fairly massive discount (as much as ten times
cheaper than typical on-demand pricing).
A user specifies the maximum price theyre willing to pay

for access to compute capacity for a period of time. The
cloud vendor periodically adjusts the spot pricing based
on demand. The user is given access to the capacity at the
current spot price until it reaches the maximum they bid,
at which point their instance(s) are terminated.
Cloud providers are incented to maximize the utilization

of their fixed resources as they represent sunk cost.
Reverse auctions are an efficient method for providers to
ensure effective resource allocation driven by the supply-
demand relationship of the cloud market, to the advan-
tage of both the customer and seller. Customers are
incented by the promise of lower costs, while public cloud
providers are able to enhance their competitiveness via
pricing, while ensuring that otherwise idle infrastructure
resources are consumed.
Lastly, multi-cloud enables the arbitrage of pricing dis-

parities across public cloud providers. Third-party CSBs
(cloud service brokerages) leverage business models in
which they provide value to consumers by aggregating
public cloud services, enabling the flexibility to transpar-
ently move between providers through a single point of
access. This portability allows end users to take advan-
tage of cost savings.
18
Making Yourself Bulletproof
In general, the use of public cloud services mitigates the
risk of data loss associated with on-prem hardware,
software, or infrastructure failure by taking advantage of
providers HA (high availability) mechanisms. But multi-
cloud solutions take this safety net one step further.
Active-active or active-standby load balancing between

multiple public cloud providers spreads the risk across
platforms, minimizing the possibility of downtime.
Resource allocation can failover between providers opti-
mizing fault tolerance.
Remember that downtime doesnt just affect

you directly through loss of productivity, but
may negatively affect your reputation.
Many high profile companies were affected by Amazons

S3 storage component failure of February 2017. An autho-
rized user mistakenly took down a larger set of servers
(all of Northern Virginia/US-EAST-1) than intended dur-
ing routine maintenance. This crippled AWS (Amazon
Web Services), which depends on S3, including their pop-
ular EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), leading to disruptions
in service from Apple, GitHub, IFTTT, Medium, Nest,
Slack, Trello, Twitch, and many others. By comparison,
there were a number of services that were unaffected by
virtue of multi-cloud diversity.
19
AWS is considered a generally reliable service (its last
major outage occurred in 2012 due to a latent memory
leak), but disruptions in service can happen to even the
best of cloud providers. For example, Microsofts Azure
experienced a multihour outage that affected parts of the
United States and Europe.
Remember to include redundancy in your

multi-cloud strategy.
A multi-cloud approach also allows for steering traffic

away from sources that provide the lowest latency
according to geographic location and/or service type.
Some cloud providers are optimized for high rates of
small data transfers (for instance, real-time communi-
cations like VoIP and video calls), others may provide
better service for lower rates of requests for larger data
transfers (for instance, end-of-season bulk data
transactions).
20
IN THIS CHAPTER
VMs versus containers
Automation and orchestration
choices
Legacy storage silos
Chapter 4
Multi-Cloud
Challenges
Y
ou may already be sold on multi-cloud solutions,
but a number of challenges are to be found along
this heros journey (apologies to Joseph Campbell).
Although you wont have to face Scylla and Charybdis on
your path to the multi-cloud, you may have to deal with
a number of issues that will feel just as scary.
Security is always a challenge in cloud, but there are

three unique challenges to multi-cloud: choosing your
virtualization technology, stitching together automated
services, and overcoming storage bottlenecks.
21
Double Standards
If you ever need help falling asleep at night, check out
NISTs Inventory of Standards Relevant to Cloud Computing.
Organizations ranging from the IETF and W3C to the
ITU-T and Open Grid forum have all offered their two
cents. In fact, NIST noted that there are only a few
approved cloud computing specific standards at pres-
ent, and that there is a fast changing landscape of
cloud computing-relevant standardization under way.
The NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap
recommends:
Agencies should specify cloud computing standards in

their procurements and grant guidance when multiple
vendors offer standards-based implementations and
there is evidence of successful interoperability testing.
Imagine having to consume this broad range of standards

to be able to confidently develop a multi-cloud strategy.
Not only are there disparate standards, but proprietary

technologies to tie together hybrid and multi-cloud envi-
ronments exist and thrive, to the point that there are ser-
vices whose only reason for being is to abstract those
APIs (application programming interfaces).
There are questions as fundamental as whether contain-

ers or VMs (virtual machines) are better for data center
deployments.
22
Virtualization is the technology that enables
workloads to be run in environments
abstracted from their underlying hardware.
Software called hypervisors allows multiple
VMs to run entirely different operating sys-
tems and applications on shared resources.
Containers enable a single operating system on a host to

run multiple applications from the cloud. Containerized
workloads are virtualized without the use of a hypervisor.
Instead, a daemon (an application that continually runs
as a background process) maintains the compartmental-
ization between containers and connects them to the
hosts kernel (the core of an OS).
Containers are small, highly portable, self-contained,

and infrastructure-agnostic. These qualities allow them
to be moved fairly easily within multi-clouds.
VMs enable better hardware resource utilization. In fact,

containers are often run on VMs. Further, they provide
isolation between instances, making them more attrac-
tive for multi-tenant solutions.
Because containers and virtualization provide unique

advantages, expect to see them in your infrastructure and
plan for supporting them in parallel.
23
Manual versus Automatic
Many of the advantages provided by cloud-based tech-
nologies depend on automation. For example, cloud
bursting depends on the providers capability to spin up
resources on-demand, without human intervention.
More often than not, this automation requires coordina-

tion between multiple, discrete tasks. As an example, a
standardized process to provision capacity to host a new
application may require the coordination between and
sequencing of disparate automated tasks, including but
not limited to:
The addition of a new instance

OS configuration
Application installation and configuration
These functions represent steps or tasks in a cloud-
automation processes. At a minimum, these steps must
occur in a specific order, because each typically depends
on the ones that precede them.
Cloud orchestration provides the coordination and

sequencing of automated tasks. In fact, many orchestra-
tion tools are referred to as schedulers. They represent a
defined workflow and are key to end-user consumption
of cloud services. Imagine if IT staff had to manage this
coordination manually.
24
Although OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Standards) developed the TOSCA
(Topology and Orchestration for Cloud Applications)
standard, there are any number of orchestration tools to
choose from, each with its unique advantages. These
choices are often driven by underlying architecture. For
example, Docker is a commonly used tool for containers.
Kubernetes may be a better choice for deploying
microservices. Orchestration of cloud infrastructure-
driven may lead you to OpenStack.
Battling the Data Deluge

Companies struggle with how to store, manage, and pro-
tect the accelerating volume of data that they generate
daily. Traditional storage infrastructures are a bottle-
neck. These rigid, costly solutions are an impediment to
digital progress.
Although modern container and orchestration technolo-

gies make application portability among clouds a reality,
data portability the ability to move data seamlessly
among different workloads, clouds, and tiers remains
the greatest challenge.
The complexity perplexity

Most storage infrastructure is deployed in discrete tiers,
with each tier designed to accommodate specific
25
performance and availability requirements. This tiered
approach leads to excessive capital and operational
expenses associated with disparate storage platforms. It
also leads to complex replication, backup, and gateway
technologies needed to interconnect and protect data
among tiers.
Software-defined storage was intended to reduce hard-

ware costs by enabling virtualization. Many legacy virtu-
alization solutions depend on expensive proprietary ECB
(external-controller based) disk storage solutions rather
than commodity hardware.
ECB disk storage arrays contain controller

and disk technology outside of a host-based
server. They typically support storage virtu-
alization, enabling concurrent drive access
and management across multiple end-user
groups and normally provide data redun-
dancy in support of high availability.
Legacy storage solutions incur operational costs regard-

less of their utilization. Cooling, power, and real estate
are consumed whether or not storage resources are fully
populated.
With three- to five-year refresh cycles, maintaining

storage infrastructure can represent a massive cyclical
expense, especially when you take into account the cost
of support, backup, and transition.
26
The waiting game
Organizations are looking at modern, distributed work-
loads like Hadoop, Spark, and Cassandra to power digital
business services. New virtualization, container, and
orchestration technologies are needed to support these
workloads.
Legacy storage solutions were often purpose-built and

tailored to specific kinds of usage. Different workloads
called for specialized platforms, forcing IT to support dis-
parate applications and maintain multiple storage silos.
Because of the inflexibility of traditional storage, it

doesnt integrate well with these systems and often takes
days or weeks to provision capacity in these environ-
ments. Digital businesses require the flexibility to enable
their storage to expand and contract at will.
When I grow up
Enterprises look to public clouds to offset costs, scale
services, and provide better availability than they can in
their own private data centers. Traditional storage arrays
are monolithic. They contained controllers that managed
a fixed-disk array. This approach yielded significant per-
formance using RAID (redundant array of independent
disks) and related technologies. These are referred to as
scale-up systems where adding capacity is accom-
plished by adding systems.
27
Further, managing data storage is nontrivial, especially
at cloud scale and legacy solutions dont easily support
data movement to public clouds, making them difficult
and expensive to scale.
Scale-up approaches use storage virtualization to repur-

pose legacy systems as fixed controller resources. Aggre-
gate performance is limited by the capabilities of the
single controller. High availability is implemented via
active-passive redundancy wasting half of available con-
troller resources.
Replication and gateway technologies help, but are com-

plex, static, and dont support the ability to move data
and workloads among data centers and clouds.
28
IN THIS CHAPTER
SDS as a multi-cloud enabler
Obstacles SDS overcomes
Important SDS features
Chapter 5
SDS and the
Multi-Cloud
O
rganizations exponential growth of data cre-
ation and consumers demands for data accessi-
bility anywhere, anytime are weighing on IT
organizations.
The true value of multi-cloud solutions is fully recog-

nized only when an organization can interact with its
entire infrastructure as a homogenous unit or cluster
regardless of the disparity of underlying architectures.
29
Traditional approaches to storage dont enable multi-
cloud. A new approach is required.
In this chapter, you will learn how Hedvigs software-

defined storage architecture, the Universal Data Plane,
meets these needs.
You Hold the Key

Software-defined storage (SDS) decouples data manage-
ment from the underlying infrastructure, enabling the
use of commodity hardware and cloud computing
instances. This means that storage can scale on-demand,
providing the called-for capacity provisioned via auto-
mated solutions with data dynamically balanced across
the storage cluster as new compute and disks are added.
A Universal Data Plane is a specific implementation of
SDS that takes this capability a step further by providing
a single, programmable data management layer that
spans workloads, clouds, and tiers. This enables true data
mobility across multiple, physically distinct clouds.
The complexity perplexity (redux)

Legacy storage creates complex islands of SAN, NAS, and
object storage to support different applications and oper-
ating systems. SDS collapses these into a single platform
decoupled from specific storage protocols and supports
any application and any operating system.
30
Traditional storage platforms are designed
for discrete tiers. A Universal Data Plane
exposes tiering policies and runs on different
classes of compute, eliminating discrete
tiers, effectively reducing CAPEX and OPEX.
The waiting game (redux)

Whereas legacy storage solutions are inherently inflexi-
ble, a Universal Data Planebased SDS provides full auto-
mation and orchestration support.
This enables flexible integration with virtualization, con-

tainer, and orchestration technologies in support of the
types of distributed workloads that power digital busi-
ness services. The result is that storage can be provi-
sioned in seconds, not days or even weeks.
When I grow up (redux)

Traditional, monolithic storage technologies scale hori-
zontally, making growth expensive.
A Universal Data Plane allows for a scale-out software

architecture, which means that capacity can be easily
provisioned, enabling storage to expand and contract
atwill.
31
Make Sure You Kick the Tires
Although SDS vendors may provide benefits compared to
traditional storage technologies, not all solutions are
created equal. Its important to consider the features that
accelerate your move to multi-cloud.
Replication
Multi-cloud solutions fall apart if data cant be made
portable across cloud boundaries.
A critical element of a Universal Data Plane is

the capability to natively replicate data among
sites to ensure locality and availability.
Stretch clustering
Stretch clustering, where host servers are part of the same
logical cluster but located in separate geographical loca-
tions, is necessary when high availability of services is a
critical success factor. This requires simultaneous read
and write across locations via uniform host access.
Stretch clustering enables easy migration of virtual

machines among locations. This can be done with full
access to data without downtime to ensure application
availability in the event of a site outage.
In the world of containers, stretch clustering is handled

by the container engine (for example, Docker Engine).
32
The portable nature of containers makes it ideal for
stretch clustering.
Built-in data protection

The explosive growth of business data means you have
more data to protect and therefore even more data to
store. This data load taxes already stretched IT budgets.
Purpose-built backup and archiving appliances combine
proprietary hardware and software to solve the problem,
but at the price of flexibility and with significant cost.
For backup, a Universal Data Plane scales

dynamically with commodity servers and
cloud computing instances both onsite and
offsite, providing an efficient platform for
secondary data for backup, archiving, and
BC/DR (business continuity and disaster
recovery). Built-in hybrid cloud support and
storage efficiency features streamline data
protection with the ideal economics and
flexibility for long-term data retention.
A Universal Data Plane benefits backup, archive, and BC/

DR operationsby delivering:
A single, massively scalable platform based on

commodity infrastructure and cloud computing
Extreme storage efficiency with inline deduplication

and compression
33
A high-availability architecture that ensures zero
downtime by protecting data across regions
Per application data policies

A Universal Data Plane-based SDS provides per-VM or
per-container storage policies.
Capabilities like deduplication, compression, caching,

and DR policies are configurable per application.
Automation and orchestration

hooks
Recall one of the biggest bottlenecks to multi-cloud is
human latency the time it takes to provision IT
resources manually. Cloud-bursting isnt possible with-
out automation and orchestration tools.
SDS provides native APIs and plugins for popular orches-

tration tools from Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, Microsoft,
OpenStack, and VMware.
Public cloud support

Finally, the SDS solution needs to run natively on public
clouds. Not all SDS solutions support AWS, Google Cloud
Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Make sure the one
you choose is certified to run in the public cloud!
34
IN THIS CHAPTER
Lower backup costs
Improve virtual server resilience
Create a self-service developer
cloud
Optimize multi-cloud data
Chapter 6
Finding Your Multi-
Cloud Path
M
oving to a multi-cloud arrangement can be a
simple decision but where to start after that
might not be. Making the jump involves an
assessment not only of where your firms priorities are,
but also what are your main challenges. Put another way:
What your firms first steps should be depend on where
your firm is on the path to multi-cloud.
To find your path, just ask yourself two questions. Do I

want to start with production or nonproduction data?
35
And do I want to start with traditional or cloud
workloads?
Figure6-1 provides a simple visual tool to help you iden-

tify your coordinates based on these two questions.
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 6-1:The multi-cloud readiness matrix.
The vertical axis represents production (primary) versus

nonproduction (secondary) environments. The horizon-
tal axis shows traditional versus cloud environments.
If your answer is that youre ready for production and

cloud, then jump in! Youre in the multi-cloud quadrant.
If thats not the case, then youll want to evolve over
time. The rest of this chapter walks you through these
migration paths.
36
Cutting Backup Costs
The easiest place to start your multi-cloud journey is
with backup. Here are a few questions to ask to see if your
organization should focus on lowering backup costs:
Do you store three or more copies of your data?

Do you have long-term data retention policies that
require you store vast amounts of data?
Do you need to restore data frequently for

business continuity or analytical purposes?
Do you want to store one or more of your copies in

the cloud?
If the answers to the preceding questions are yes, here

are the steps you can take to achieve that goal:
Use SDS as a backup target that directly integrates

with your backup software.
Deploy a combination of datacenters (for perfor-

mance and restorability) and public clouds (for
long-term retention and durability) to optimize
your backup data set.
Implement deduplication and compression to

lower the footprint of your data.
37
After you master backup, youre ready to take the next
step in your multi-cloud journey: virtual server infra-
structure! See Figure6-2.
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 6-2:Master backup and move on to virtual servers.
Making Your Virtual Servers

More Resilient
Here are a few questions to ask to see if your organization
should focus on improving virtual server resilience:
Have you virtualized more than 85 percent of your

applications?
Are you looking to deploy a second or even third

hypervisor to lower costs?
38
Do you want to automate failover from one data
center to another?
Do want to add public cloud to the architecture, but

not yet?

Use SDS to manage storage across multiple

hypervisor platforms.
Deploy both hyperconverged and hyperscale

platforms based on application needs.
Hyperconverged is good for fixed workloads like
VDI and SQL; hyperscale is good for all others.
Implement cross-datacenter, synchronous

replication to increase resilience and avoid site
outages.
After youve mastered your virtual server infrastructure,

youre ready to take the big step to multi-cloud! See
Figure6-3.
39
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 6-3:Make virtual servers resilient to go multi-cloud.
Making a Self-Service
Developer Cloud
If youre already in the cloud world, then your path to
multi-cloud is much faster. Its just a single step!
Here are a few questions to ask to see if your organization

should focus on creating a self-service developer cloud:
Are your developers bringing new tools like

Docker in-house?
40
Do your developers create apps quickly and need
self-service access to provision their own server
and storage resources?
Do you use public clouds like AWS, but need to

provide an on-premises alternative for security or
costs purposes?
Have you have formed a DevOps team or are you

looking to improve app release times?

Use SDS APIs to bridge new environments like

containers with traditional environments like
hypervisors.
Deploy a self-service portal so developers and

DevOps can directly provision server and storage
resources like they would in AWS.
Implement the capability to develop an application

in the public cloud and push it into production on
private cloud infrastructure, or vice versa. See
Figure6-4.
41
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 6-4:Grow self-service developer cloud to multi-cloud.
Optimizing Multi-Cloud Data

After developers are off and running with cloud services,
youre ready for production-grade multi-cloud.
Regardless of whether you evolved your way to multi-

cloud or jumped right in, here are a few questions to ask
to see if your organization should focus on optimizing
multi-cloud data:
Do you already operate in more than one cloud?

Are you looking to move data dynamically across
cloud boundaries?
42
Are you looking to right-size which applications run
in which cloud locations?
Are you looking to minimize risk by running across

more than one cloud to avoid outages?

Use SDS to replicate and synchronize data across

those public clouds.
Deploy containers as a way of moving the

application. VMs arent necessarily going to work
because every cloud runs a different hypervisor.
Containers will work because every cloud runs
Docker Engine.
Implement orchestration tools to automate the

provisioning and movement of apps.
And youre done! Youve stepped into the future and

youre now a multi-cloud master. See Figure6-5.
43
Source: Hedvig
FIGURE 6-5:Optimize data to master multi-cloud.
44
IN THIS CHAPTER
Ten reasons to move to multi-
cloud
Chapter 7
Ten Reasons to
Go Multi-Cloud
H ere are ten benefits to make your multi-cloud

business case.
Avoid cloud lock-in: Multi-cloud architectures give

you the flexibility to easily switch cloud providers.
Reduce risk of cloud downtime: Failures happen.

Theres no avoiding it. By using more than one
provider, you can architect for redundancy.
45
Leverage cloud bursting: Multi-cloud solutions
free you from resource overprovisioning. You can
use on-demand cloud capacity.
Improve time-to-market: Digital business requires a

cloud-centric approach. Bring digital services to market
faster by choosing the right cloud at the right time.
Align IT with digital business: Cloud is necessary,

butdifferent clouds are needed for different priorities.
Embrace the cloud that best aligns with the business.
Incorporate emerging tech like containers:

Dont be blindsided by new turns in the IT technol-
ogy roadmap. Multi-cloud enables you to easily
accommodate emerging tech.
Increase developer productivity: Multi-cloud

ensures developers can rapidly prototype in the
cloud and then push the application live in another
cloud in seconds.
Decrease cloud costs: Maybe AWS is giving you a

better price this month, but Azure is better next.
Play clouds off each other and get the best pricing.
Respond to the business faster: Execute your business

application in the cloud closest to where the action is.
Provide better customer experience: Multi-cloud

is about engaging new customers and markets.
Provide the best experience by running your
services in the best cloud.
46
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To meet these challenges, the journey to the cloud is

Architects and decision makers have pursued a hybrid-

What if you could overcome these limitations? What if

About This Book

Icons Used in the Book

If, like Steven Wright, you often suffer amne-

Next to this icon is a helpful hint based on

Some people like to dive into bits and bytes

Danger, Will Robinson!

Consumers expect more faster and better. Companies

The IoT (Internet of Things) has introduced embedded

Big data and AI (artificial intelligence) drive

How Time to Market Is

Further, they expect new features, automation and inte-

Iterative and incremental (agile) software development

Whereas the traditional waterfall methodol-

Technology needs to be an enabler. Digital

Enter DevOps. DevOps represents the union of develop-

Further, it empowers employees, leading to greater pro-

A key enabler for DevOps is the availability of cloud

The world is going cloud-based. Rather than waiting

The challenge for medium to large enter-

Multiple Clouds Means

Bottom line: Its a multi-cloud world.

Virtualization also enabled cloud computing or the deliv-

Public clouds are easy to use and have few

Private clouds provide greater reliability by protecting

Private clouds are often used by businesses, like financial

Often, this means maintaining sensitive data or hosting

Hybrid clouds are most valuable for organi-

Multi-cloud solutions are a superset of hybrid clouds.

Enter SDS (software defined storage) as part of a larger

The SDDC is the bedrock of modern IT. Its a necessity

Software-defined data centers enable you to tame the

FIGURE 2-1:The SDDC stack.

The SDDC is composed of several architec-

SDN (software defined networking) software-

SDS, or software that enables provisioning and

Software-defined compute, where the computing

Lets All Be Mature

FIGURE 2-2:The three stages of cloud maturity.

What percentage of my apps are virtualized?

Am I using automation and orchestration tools?

How many, if any, public clouds am I using?

This chapter discuses four key benefits of going multi-

FIGURE 3-1:The four benefits of going multi-cloud.

By making sure theyre not locked in to a single vendor,

An effect of a multi-cloud strategy is that companies

Reducing On-Prem Costs

Multi-cloud solutions allow for on-demand allocation of

This means that organizations no longer need to over-

Reducing Public Cloud Costs

Public cloud providers offer a wide range of pricing mod-

A user specifies the maximum price theyre willing to pay

Cloud providers are incented to maximize the utilization

Lastly, multi-cloud enables the arbitrage of pricing dis-

Active-active or active-standby load balancing between

Remember that downtime doesnt just affect

Many high profile companies were affected by Amazons

Remember to include redundancy in your