Multi-Cloud Architecture and Governance

Jeroen Mulder

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781800201910
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Systemarchitektur

A comprehensive guide to architecting, managing, implementing, and controlling multi-cloud environments

Key Features

• Deliver robust multi-cloud environments and improve your business productivity
• Stay in control of the cost, governance, development, security, and continuous improvement of your multi-cloud solution
• Integrate different solutions, principles, and practices into one multi-cloud foundation

Book Description

Multi-cloud has emerged as one of the top cloud computing trends, with businesses wanting to reduce their reliance on only one vendor. But when organizations shift to multiple cloud services without a clear strategy, they may face certain difficulties, in terms of how to stay in control, how to keep all the different components secure, and how to execute the cross-cloud development of applications. This book combines best practices from different cloud adoption frameworks to help you find solutions to these problems.With step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you'll begin by planning the foundation, creating the architecture, designing the governance model, and implementing tools, processes, and technologies to manage multi-cloud environments. You'll then discover how to design workload environments using different cloud propositions, understand how to optimize the use of these cloud technologies, and automate and monitor the environments. As you advance, you'll delve into multi-cloud governance, defining clear demarcation models and management processes. Finally, you'll learn about managing identities in multi-cloud: who's doing what, why, when, and where.By the end of this book, you'll be able to create, implement, and manage multi-cloud architectures with confidence

What you will learn

• Get to grips with the core functions of multiple cloud platforms
• Deploy, automate, and secure different cloud solutions
• Design network strategy and get to grips with identity and access management for multi-cloud
• Design a landing zone spanning multiple cloud platforms
• Use automation, monitoring, and management tools for multi-cloud
• Understand multi-cloud management with the principles of BaseOps, FinOps, SecOps, and DevOps
• Define multi-cloud security policies and use cloud security tools
• Test, integrate, deploy, and release using multi-cloud CI/CD pipelines

Who this book is for

This book is for architects and lead engineers involved in architecting multi-cloud environments, with a focus on getting governance right to stay in control of developments in multi-cloud. Basic knowledge of different cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, VMWare, and OpenStack) and understanding of IT governance is necessary.

]]>

Section 1 – Introduction to Architecture and Governance for Multi-Cloud Environments

In this section, you will understand how building and maintaining an environment using different cloud providers, concepts, and technologies requires architecture and clearly defined governance on the multi-cloud estate.

The following chapters will be covered in this section:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Multi-Cloud
• Chapter 2, Business Acceleration Using a Multi-Cloud Strategy
• Chapter 3, Getting Connected – Designing Connectivity
• Chapter 4, Service Design for Multi-Cloud
• Chapter 5, Managing the Enterprise Cloud Architecture

Chapter 1: Introduction to Multi-Cloud

The main goal of this chapter is to develop a foundational understanding of what multi-cloud is and why companies have a multi-cloud strategy. We will focus on the main public cloud platforms of Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), next to the different on-premises variants of these platforms such as Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, Google Anthos, and the VMware propositions such as VMConAWS. We will also look at the benefits, how to develop to a strategy using one or more of these platforms, and what should be the very first starting point for multi-cloud.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Understanding what a true multi-cloud concept is
• A basic understanding of translating business requirements to a multi-cloud strategy
• An introduction to the main technology providers

Understanding multi-cloud concepts

This book aims to take you on a journey along the different major cloud platforms and will try to answer one crucial question: if my organization deploys IT systems on various cloud platforms, how do I keep control? We want to avoid cases where costs in multi-cloud environments grow over our heads, where we don't have a clear overview of who's managing the systems, and, most importantly, where system sprawl introduces severe security risks. But before we start our deep dive, we need to agree on a common understanding of multi-cloud and multi-cloud concepts.

There are multiple definitions of multi-cloud, but we're using the one stated on https://www.techopedia.com/definition/33511/multi-cloud-strategy:

Multi-cloud refers to the use of two or more cloud computing systems at the same time. The deployment might use public clouds, private clouds, or some combination of the two. Multi-cloud deployments aim to offer redundancy in case of hardware/software failures and avoid vendor lock-in.

Let's focus on some topics in that definition. First of all, we need to realize where most organizations come from: traditional data centers with physical and virtual systems, hosting a variety of functions and business applications. If you want to call this legacy, that's OK. But do realize that the cutting edge of today is the legacy of tomorrow. Hence, in this book, we will refer to "traditional" IT when we're discussing the traditional systems, typically hosted in physical, privately owned data centers. And with that, we've already introduced the first problem in the definition that we just gave for multi-cloud.

A lot of enterprises call their virtualized environments private clouds, whether these are hosted in external data centers or in self-owned, on-premises data centers. What they usually mean is that these environments host several business units that get billed for consumption on a centrally managed platform. You can have long debates on whether this is really using the cloud, but the fact is that there is a broad description that sort of fits the concept of private clouds.

Of course, when talking about the cloud, most of us will think of the major public cloud offerings that we have today: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. By another definition, multi-cloud is a best-of-breed solution from these different platforms, creating added value for the business in combination with this solution and/or service. So, using the cloud can mean either a combination of solutions and services in the public cloud, or combined with private cloud solutions.

But the simple feature of combining solutions and services from different cloud providers and/or private clouds does not make up the multi-cloud concept alone. There's more to it.

Maybe the best way to explain this is by using the analogy of the smartphone. Let's assume you are buying a new phone. You take it out of the box and switch it on. Now, what can you do with that phone? First of all, if there's no subscription with a telecom provider attached to the phone, the user will discover that the functionality of the device is probably very limited. There will be no connection from the phone to the outside world, at least not on a mobile network. An option would be to connect it through a Wi-Fi device, if Wi-Fi is available. In short, one of the first actions, in order to actually use the phone, would be making sure that it has connectivity.

Now we have a brand new smartphone set to its factory defaults and we have it connected to the outside world. Ready to go? Probably not. The user probably wants to have all sorts of services delivered to their phone, usually through the use of apps, delivered through online catalogs such as an app store. The apps themselves come from different providers and companies including banks and retailers, and might even be coded in different languages. Yet, by compiling the apps – transforming the code in such a way that it can be read and understood by different devices – they will work on different phones with different versions of mobile operating systems such as iOS or Android.

The user will also very likely want to configure these apps to their personal needs and wishes. Lastly, the user needs to be able to access the data on their phone. All in all, the phone has turned into a landing platform for all sorts of personalized services and data.

The best part is that in principle, the user of the phone doesn't have to worry about updates. Every now and then the operating system will automatically be updated and most of the installed apps will still work perfectly. It might take a day or two for some apps to adapt to the new settings, but in the end, they will work. And the data that is stored on the phone or accessed via some cloud directory will also still be available. The whole ecosystem around that smartphone is designed in such a way that from the end user's perspective, the technology is completely transparent:

Figure 1.1 – Analogy of the smartphone—a true multi-cloud concept

Well, this is the cloud concept, where the smartphone in our analogy is the actual integrated landing zone, where literally everything comes together, providing a seamless user experience.

Multi-cloud – more than just public and private

There's a difference between hybrid IT and multi-cloud, and there are different opinions on the definitions. One is that hybrid platforms are homogenous and multi-cloud platforms are heterogenous. Homogenous here means that the cloud solutions belong to one stack, for instance, the Azure public cloud with Azure Stack on premises. Heterogenous, then, would mean combining Azure and AWS, for instance.

For now, we will keep it very simple: a hybrid environment is combining an on-premises stack – a private cloud – with a public cloud. It is a very common deployment model within enterprises. There have been numerous reports that stated some years ago that most enterprises would transform their IT to the public cloud by 2020. It was the magic year, 2020, and a lot of organizations developed a Cloud Strategy 2020. It certainly did have a nice ring to it, but magical? Not really. These same organizations soon discovered that it was not that easy to migrate all of their systems to a public cloud. Some systems would have to remain on premises, for various reasons.

Two obvious reasons were security and latency. To start with the first one: this is all about sensitive data and privacy, especially concerning data that may not be hosted outside a country, or outside certain regional borders, such as the EU. Data may not be accessible in whatever way to – as an example – US-based companies, which in itself is already quite a challenge in the cloud domain. Regulations, laws, guidelines, and compliance rules often prevent companies from moving their data off premises, even though public clouds offer frameworks and technologies to protect data at the very highest level. We will discuss this later on in this book, since security and data privacy are of utmost importance in the cloud.

Latency is the second reason to keep systems on premises. One example that probably everyone can relate to is that of print servers. Print servers in the public cloud might not be a good idea. The problem with print servers is the spooling process. The spooling software accepts the print jobs and controls the printer to which the print assignment has to be sent. It then schedules the order in which print jobs are actually sent to that printer. Although print spoolers have been improved massively over the last years, it still takes some time to execute the process. Print servers in the public cloud might cause delays in that process. Fair enough: it can be done, and it will work if configured in the right way, in a cloud region close to the sending PC and receiving printer device, plus accessed through a proper connection.

You get the idea, in any case: there are functions and applications that are highly sensitive to latency. One more example: retail companies have warehouses where they store their goods. When items are purchased, the process of order picking starts. Items are labeled in a supply system so that the company can track how many of a specific item are still in stock, where the items originate from, and where they have t...