Multicloud PaaS: Service Consistency Equals Cloud-Native Success

It’s clear that cloud-native applications are set to play a major role in the future of application development and delivery. Cloud-native applications, built with principles like containerization and microservices, are designed for agility and scalability.

Our customers often tell us that cloud-native technologies, such as containers, empower engineering teams to develop and deploy applications quickly, scale applications, and achieve high quality across datacenters, public clouds and the edge.

Containers offer many advantages. They can be spun up and down quickly, allowing for dynamic scaling of an application in response to changes in workload demands. They allow applications to be built as small, independent, and reusable services that can be integrated to build complex applications.

When used with a container management platform like Kubernetes®, microservices architecture allows applications built on containers to be operated efficiently in hybrid multicloud environments. That means they can be deployed anywhere – in the cloud, at the edge and on-premises.

Containers were initially built on the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model. This pre-fabricated approach enables the rapid creation of various container types, significantly accelerating the deployment process compared to traditional methods.

However, given containers' flexible nature, they need to be traced, monitored and managed more closely than IaaS can offer. The foundation evolved to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings from public cloud vendors and later hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) providers.

With PaaS, applications are built using modular services, allowing rapid development of new business logic via public APIs without the need to manage the underlying platform infrastructure.

You can visualize IaaS, PaaS and applications as a three-tiered stackable creation. IaaS provides the foundational layer of stable, interconnecting blocks in various sizes and configurations. PaaS sits atop IaaS as the middle layer, while applications form the top.

Challenges in Hybrid and Multicloud Environments

PaaS offers many advantages in the form of data services, prebuilt APIs, networking services, security services, and more. But PaaS offerings are traditionally unique to the cloud and HCI providers. This means diversified offering from multiple providers still creates complexity in hybrid or multicloud environments.

Organizations are steadily adopting hybrid and hybrid multicloud environments coupled with an increasing number of more cloud-native applications filling their portfolio. Given their flexibility to be deployed, pitfalls are bound to arise.

Heterogeneity

Juggling on-premises infrastructure with diverse public cloud offerings creates a complex landscape with varying APIs, tools and management approaches. Think of it as deploying applications and managing various platform services with independent versions across on-premises and the public cloud – a fragmented management approach.

Visibility and observability

Gaining a unified view of application performance, resource utilization and potential issues across these various microservices is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Traditional monitoring tools will struggle to provide a holistic view.

Security tightrope walk

Maintaining consistent security policies and ensuring compliance with regulations across multiple platforms requires robust security practices and tools. A security breach in one cloud can ripple through the entire interconnected system.

Portability pitfall

Ideally, your applications should be portable across clouds. However, vendor-specific platform services can create lock-in to a particular provider, which hinders portability.

These issues can lead to compatibility issues, increasing complexity for IT and cloud operators, security vulnerabilities, and user confusion and inefficiency, causing difficulty with training and onboarding.

Factor in AI. Organizations that are building cloud-native applications today will need to evolve their capabilities to manage AI workloads because the next generation of cloud-native applications will have AI at their core. That means additional configuration and security challenges. I’ll talk about data management and AI in subsequent articles.

Achieving Service Consistency with Multicloud PaaS

Managing cloud-native applications across hybrid and hybrid multicloud environments requires a well-defined strategy, the right tools and a skilled team.

To achieve the most from cloud-native applications, Day 1 deployment and Day 2 operations must be consistent and centrally managed, regardless of location or cloud provider host.

The way to achieve cloud-native service consistency is with a new level of PaaS that spans clouds across geographic borders. I call this multicloud PaaS.

A multicloud PaaS gives you more than just a compute layer. It provides three essential components that make hybrid cloud-native applications possible:

1. A secure container runtime managed by Kubernetes.

2. A multicluster Kubernetes manager that controls clusters and deploys applications uniformly.

3. Platform services provided uniformly on-premises and across different clouds.

This homogenization of cluster management ensures a uniform platform and central control so that you don't end up with hundreds of clusters, each with different configurations and security protocols. It also ensures uniformly managed data with the right storage functions, the right level of availability, replication, and disaster recovery.

Getting that right set of storage functions is very important.

As enterprises continue to adopt cloud-native applications at a growing rate, they need to consider a multicloud PaaS as a way to ensure the consistency required to deploy and manage their portfolio or run the risk of facing manual and inconsistent deployment and management pitfalls.

Advice for IT Decision Makers

When evaluating potential platforms for building a multicloud PaaS, consider the following questions:

• Does the platform provide a secure container runtime managed by Kubernetes?

• Can it manage multiple clusters and deploy applications uniformly across different environments?

• Does it offer consistent platform services, including data, networking and security services across on-premises and cloud environments?

• How does the platform handle visibility and observability across hybrid and multicloud environments?

• What are the trade-offs in terms of compute cost and latency, and how do they impact overall performance and efficiency?

• How does the platform ensure consistent security policies and compliance with regulations across multiple platforms?

By addressing these questions, IT decision makers can better evaluate the capabilities of potential platforms and ensure they choose a solution that meets their needs for consistency, scalability and ease of management in hybrid and hybrid multicloud environments.

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