You’ve probably been through this: You know you must transform your operations to improve agility and adopt new technologies which speed up your delivery capabilities. You collect information about the candidates – Kubernetes, OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, and others – and try to evaluate their suitability for your business. But it seems to hard to match all requirements with one platform. Especially, when it is still unsure where your own business is heading to.
So how to find the right platform?
There is an easy answer to this problem: You don’t.
Every platform has its strengths and weaknesses and – sometimes even more important – their supporters and communities. Because apart from the technical performance it is sometimes more important to get the people and skills you need to create your solutions. And if you are flexible with your infrastructure, you have a greater selection of expertise on the market. Given the diverse – and sometimes conflicting – requirements of applications, it is easy to see that there is hardly a platform that serves all of them best.
Therefore it makes sense to chose different tools for different purposes. Welcome to the world of Multi-Cloud! A best-of-breed approach to cloud platforms enables you to stay flexible, use the right tool for the matching purpose and find sufficient skills on the market to implement your solutions. Vendor lock-in is no longer a threat to you and you can always use the most efficient technology to do the job.
Multi-Cloud – the freedom or burden of choice?
Sounds great, right? But there is a danger threatening the shiny dream: complexity. Every platform adds its own procedures for managing projects, users, permissions and so on. Your organization needs to build up all those skills and stick those tedious administrative burdens together. You create overhead, people are busy with dull routine tasks instead of increasing functionality. Everything slows down.
People start to use two different platforms for the same project and now they have to keep the configuration in sync and manage an inventory of dependencies. Hopefully it is up to date (you know it probably won’t be for very long). And how do people access shared services like databases and where do they find them? So much implicit knowledge is dangerous for reliable operations. Oh and did we already talk about cost distribution? How do you split platform costs to the responsible projects? Another task not related to providing features for your product.
Choice without lose of control
We here at meshcloud are dedicated to make Multi-Cloud a joyful experience. Our software takes over the task of the tedious wiring and provides you with a unified interface for your platform orchestration. Your users can quickly access all the cloud resources they need, while the IT department stays in control of who is doing what and where. We currently support management of OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, OpenShift and AWS platforms and continue to expand on other technologies.
Do you want to learn more? Please send us a note and we will get in touch with you.