While midsize businesses currently use up to eight clouds from different vendors, it is expected that by 2023, 94% of large enterprises should be able to run their workloads on a multitude of different clouds.
This approach has obvious advantages: its wide choice of quality services allows developers to always be innovative and make companies more competitive and resilient.
However, a multicloud strategy does not only have advantages. A patchwork of different clouds can be difficult to monitor and secure, and bringing them all into compliance can be very expensive. It’s a good idea to dedicate skills and knowledge to specific clouds, or spread them across clouds – or else resources will be distributed inefficiently. Tracking expenses (and seeing if it represents good value for money) can become an important analytical exercise.
The question then arises: how can a company resolve this paradox?
The answer is: there is a need to rethink application development – not in terms of its technical building blocks (such as containers, clusters, Kubernetes or service meshes) but as an end-to-end platform , orchestrated by a single console. This approach allows non-technical personnel to access the world of DevSecOps and easily obtain the operational information needed to make sound business decisions.
The allocation of the budget is therefore a key element of this approach. In a multi-cloud setup, there is no one-size-fits-all way of doing things: clusters running on different clouds have to follow different rules and processes, whether it’s provisioning, SLAs, service, operating systems, patch cycles, storage types, or networking systems. Tools may also vary. So, as the business grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to know where the costs are really going and what the return on investment will be. There is therefore a risk that the areas of overspending or underspending will be hidden and left to be abandoned afterwards.
Conversely, a core application platform provides a single overview of all clusters, making it easier to identify costs and potentially more efficient spend. Waste is further reduced as the platform is able to aggregate and increase the capacities of different clouds, which facilitates the creation of standardized and targeted clusters, which only access the data necessary according to the different tasks to be done. As a result, developers’ work isn’t slowed down by the setup process, allowing them to focus more on building comprehensive, high-performing applications, and thus delivering more value to the business.
Compliance is another pain point that can be managed by bringing multicloud workloads together on a common basis. Today, data has become one of the most regulated aspects of business. Any effort to give developers more freedom and agility must be balanced with a scientific understanding of the data they use and produce. The same principle applies to security: a multicloud setup can increase the potential attack surface, while vulnerabilities can be harder to spot. Thus, securing its entire structure is a real challenge when protecting many independent fiefdoms instead of one large kingdom.
In the age of multicloud, the application platform aims to ensure compliance and security. By centralizing security policies and protocols, it helps ensure consistent standards across clouds. This data visibility is not only crucial for compliance obligations, but it can also be leveraged by developers to optimize data flows between APIs. A parallel trend is the “shift-left” mentality, which integrates security considerations at the source – that is, when developers start writing code. This helps improve time-to-market and agility, and supports critical aspects of modern application development such as collaboration, repeatability, and availability.
It is by adding this integration and orchestration between clouds that a company’s strategy shifts from multicloud to hybrid cloud. The benefits of hybrid cloud are magnified by the growth of edge computing. The ecosystem is diverse and complex. Edge devices tend to be built with a specific task in mind and therefore often come from multiple vendors, which can create chaos. But unifying everything through a scalable application platform brings consistency and flexibility that drives innovation.
The logic is the same if your IT landscape keeps things on-premises. Businesses face tough decisions on how to modernize their legacy applications. Using a common abstraction layer to create interoperability between on-premises and cloud environments makes it easy to “lift and shift” or refactor specific pieces of code.
That being said, an application platform is a complex tapestry of multiple capabilities and protocols. Building one from scratch is likely to exceed the resources used by many IT teams and require significant investment, which can, in fact, be risky. Moreover, with the rapid evolution of DevOps over time, it is essential that any platform be continuously improved.
Instead, companies can opt for their usual reaction when faced with a new technology opportunity: look to technology partners who can enable them to seize it. When more of the teams can be assigned to front-line development rather than back-end engineering, business productivity will be increased and market competitiveness should follow.