While everyone is talking about cloud, there’s a lot of confusion around cloud terms like public, private, hybrid and multi. And deciding whether your company should move to the cloud, and which cloud approach to adopt, can be even more confusing
To help clarify the jargon, opportunities and challenges of cloud, EDB participated in the webinar: Hybrid and Multi-Cloud: The Future of Web Computing. The session featured EDB Field CTO Julian Moffett and Information Week Moderator Terry Sweeney.
Watch the full on-demand webinar here
Moffett kicked off the webinar by defining what hybrid and multi-cloud mean:
Hybrid cloud – Hybrid is a combination of public and private cloud services, allowing for security and control with scalability and cost efficiency.
Multi-cloud – Multi is the use of multiple public cloud services from different providers, reducing vendor lock-in and increasing resilience.
Five or six years ago, the word cloud was synonymous with public cloud providers, primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. Today, the term cloud also refers to the operating model that enables rapid delivery of technology solutions.
In addition, when people talk about cloud today, they often mean a combination of private and public cloud.
Why would you want to adopt a hybrid or multi-cloud approach? Here are a few reasons:
Flexibility (Hybrid) – Hybrid allows you to move workloads to the most suitable environment based on application capability, performance and cost requirements.
Cost optimization (Hybrid) – With a hybrid model, you can place workloads where the best price-to-performance ratio can be achieved. For example, if your company has an annual HR employee review system supported by an on premise, back-end database that gets a lot of traffic and needs additional computing power only one month a year, moving this service to a public cloud service provider can allow you to scale up and scale down your workload as needed and minimize costs.
Vendor lock-in avoidance (Multi-cloud) – Multi-cloud reduces concentration risk and lock-in to a single provider’s services and pricing structures and facilitates increased competition between cloud providers around cost ratio and service quality.
Improved resilience (Hybrid & Multi-cloud) – Multi-cloud enables you to distribute workloads across multiple clouds and providers, which can help you protect against outages in the event of a disruption or provider failure, allow for high availability, and extend backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Improved security and compliance (Hybrid) – Sensitive data can remain on premise and non-sensitive data can be stored in the public cloud with a hybrid set up. This can reduce risk of data breaches and cyberattacks and potentially improve compliance with data privacy regulations.
Data Sovereignty (Hybrid & Multi-cloud) – If your business expands into a new territory with data sovereignty requirements to maintain data in that jurisdiction, but you don’t have a data center there, leveraging a hyperscaler environment in the region in hybrid mode can be a viable solution. If you have an existing cloud service provider that doesn’t offer service in that jurisdiction, you may need to use a different cloud service provider – and then you’ve become effectively multi-cloud!
Innovation (Hybrid & Multi-cloud) – A mix of available environments can facilitate faster time to market and drive innovation. With public cloud, developers can set up a running infrastructure platform to develop on in a few clicks. They can “fail fast”, where a business model or hypothesis can be built out and tested very quickly and inexpensively.
Moffett emphasizes that even if you’re predominately an on-premise company, don’t discount the opportunity that a public cloud implementation can provide.
Differentiating services (Hybrid & Multi-cloud) – Public cloud providers have gone way beyond being the data center in the sky. There are some superb, higher level services that you can get across all three of the big providers these days, which can truly differentiate your business.
When you look at cloud adoption, it doesn’t have to be a binary decision or an all-or-nothing proposition. You don’t have to be exclusively on premise, or only in the public cloud. At EDB, we really encourage customers to take a look at both, and even mix and match to take full advantage of the capabilities that are out there.
So why isn’t everyone running in the cloud?
Moffett points out that most organizations are, almost by accident, either hybrid or multi- cloud, with hybrid essentially the default. But without the right support and tools, running in the cloud can be challenging.
Here are a few of the challenges:
Compatibility: Organizations that find themselves running in hybrid or even multi-cloud by accident, without the usual planning, can experience challenges with integration and compatibility.
Risk: Different cloud service providers may implement variations of key security requirements, which may require working with internal risk teams to ensure security and risk are being managed and internal compliance standards are being met.
Training: Different skill sets may also be required for different cloud service providers, and It can be expensive and time consuming to train staff. If developers need to do things differently in every single environment, it may throttle time to market and even affect the customer experience.
Visibility: Overall visibility into the health of your database estate may be compromised. And with different pricing models, actual real costs may be difficult to forecast.
EDB offers a consistent Postgres experience in any cloud
As you can see, while there are enormous benefits with hybrid and multi-cloud, there are also a number of challenges. Working with an experienced partner like EDB can help you address and overcome these hurdles.
For starters, we offer tools that are consistent across all the different environments. Our software runs on premise, in public clouds, on bare metal, on hypervisor layer, on Kubernetes and more, and it's all the same set of binaries. So you’ll have a consistent user interface and Postgres experience in all environments.
Our public cloud offering, BigAnimal, runs across all of the cloud service providers, so you don’t need to manage the nuances between PostgreSQL, or Amazon Relational Database Service or Cloud SQL in GCP.
While most of our customers are on a journey to the cloud, they take different paths. But no matter which approach you take, we have the databases, the tools, and the people you need to unlock the true value of cloud.