Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects E-Book

Jeroen Mulder

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your enterprise with the transformative power of multi-cloud adoption? As a cloud architect, you understand the challenges of navigating the vast array of cloud services and moving data and applications to public clouds. But with 'Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects, Second Edition', you'll gain the confidence to tackle these complexities head-on.
This edition delves into the latest concepts of BaseOps, FinOps, and DevSecOps, including the use of the DevSecOps Maturity Model. You'll learn how to optimize costs and maximize security using the major public clouds - Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Examples of solutions by the increasingly popular Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Alibaba Cloud have been added in this edition. Plus, you will discover cutting-edge ideas like AIOps and GreenOps.
With practical use cases, including IoT, data mining, Web3, and financial management, this book empowers you with the skills needed to develop, release, and manage products and services in a multi-cloud environment.
By the end of this book, you'll have mastered the intricacies of multi-cloud operations, financial management, and security. Don't miss your chance to revolutionize your enterprise with multi-cloud adoption.

Leseprobe

Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects

Second Edition

Learn how to adopt and manage public clouds by leveraging BaseOps, FinOps, and DevSecOps

Jeroen Mulder

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects

Second Edition

Copyright © 2023 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Senior Publishing Product Manager: Rahul Nair

Acquisition Editor – Peer Reviews: Gaurav Gavas

Project Editor: Rianna Rodrigues

Content Development Editor: Grey Murtagh

Copy Editor: Safis Editing

Technical Editor: Srishty Bhardwaj

Proofreader: Safis Editing

Indexer: Pratik Shirodkar

Presentation Designer: Ganesh Bhadwalkar

Developer Relations Marketing Executive: Monika Sangwan

First published: December 2020

Second edition: April 2023

Production reference: 1210423

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-80461-673-4

www.packt.com

To my wife: I owe you big time. And to my inspirational sources, Eckart Wintzen and Wubbo Ockels. You left too soon.

– Jeroen Mulder

Contributors

About the author

After his study in Journalism, Jeroen Mulder (born 1970) started his career as editor for the economic pages of Dutch newspapers. In 1998 he got involved in internet projects for the British publisher Reed Business Information, creating websites and digital platforms. Highly attracted by the possibilities of the new digital era, Jeroen decided to pursue a career in digital technologies. In 2000 he joined the IT company Origin, which later became Atos Origin and eventually Atos. Within Atos he has fulfilled many roles, but always in the heart of technology.

Jeroen is a certified enterprise and security architect. From 2014 onwards he started concentrating more and more on cloud technology. This included architecture for cloud infrastructure, serverless and container technology, DevOps, security, and AI.

In March 2017 he joined the Japanese technology company Fujitsu, focusing on cloud solutions. In 2021 he was appointed principal cloud architect at Philips Precision Diagnosis, but decided to return to Fujitsu in 2022, where he currently holds the position of principal consultant for the company’s global multi-cloud and security solutions.

Jeroen regularly publishes articles about cloud developments, AI, and emerging tech, and is frequently invited to perform as a speaker at tech events. With Packt, he has previously published books about multi-cloud, DevOps for enterprise architects, and the digital transformation of healthcare.

Once again, I must thank my wonderful wife, Judith, and my two girls for granting me the space and time to write. A big thank you goes out to the whole Packt editing team for making this another epic journey. Lastly, thank you, Fujitsu, for rehiring me. I’m having a blast.

About the reviewers

Juan Ramón Cabrera is a Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft with 25+ years of IT experience. He has worked in the army, as an entrepreneur, and in various IT roles, from developer to team lead and IT manager. He has expertise in software development, DevOps, Agile, security, infrastructure, and cloud architecture. He holds several certifications from Microsoft (such as Azure Architect Expert), AWS (CSA Associate), and the Linux Foundation (CKA, CKAD).

Thanks to the author and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to participate and contribute my knowledge and experience to this book. I enjoyed it a lot. Congrats for your work.

Kamesh Ganesan is a seasoned technology professional, an author, and a leader with over 25 years of IT experience in all major cloud technologies, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle and Alibaba. He has over 55 IT and cloud certifications. He has played many IT roles and architected and delivered mission-critical, innovative technology solutions that have helped commercial enterprise and government clients to be very successful. He has written AWS and Azure books and has reviewed many IT/cloud technology books and courses.

I am extremely thankful for all the Gods’ blessings in my life. A special thanks to my wife, Hemalatha, for her motivation and continuous support in all my pursuits, and many thanks to my kids, Sachin and Arjun, for their unconditional love. I am very grateful to my father, Ganesan, and mother, Kasthuri, for their unwavering encouragement throughout my life.

Preface

Enterprises are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy, using a mix of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), hosted on platforms such as AWS, Azure, and other technology stacks. This leaves the architects and lead engineers with the challenge of how to integrate architectures and manage the enterprise cloud. Architects and engineers will learn how to design, implement, and integrate cloud solutions and set up controls for governance.

The first edition of this book was released in 2020, but developments in the cloud are rapidly evolving. This edition is extended with two cloud platforms that have grown significantly over the past years, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Alibaba Cloud. New methodologies have also been adopted by companies to improve cloud management. This includes the financial controls of FinOps and embedded security in DevSecOps.

After the introduction of the concept of multi-cloud, this book covers all of the topics that architects should consider when designing systems for multi-cloud platforms. That starts with designing connectivity to and between the various platforms and creating landing zones in Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Alibaba Cloud. These clouds will be discussed in this book.

The book is divided into four main sections, covering the following:

Introduction to cloud and multi-cloud architecture and governanceOperations, including setting up and managing the landing zones that provide the infrastructure for cloud environmentsFinancial operations using the principles of FinOpsContinuous delivery and deployment using DevSecOps, covering identity and access management, securing data, security information, and new concepts such as AIOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

The book contains best practices for the major providers, discusses common pitfalls and how to avoid them, and gives recommendations for methodologies and tools. Of course, a book about multi-cloud could never be complete, but this book will provide you with good guidelines to get started with architecting for multi-cloud.

Who this book is for

This book targets architects and lead engineers who are involved in architecting multi-cloud environments using Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI, and Alibaba Cloud. A basic understanding of cloud platforms and overall Cloud Adoption Frameworks is required.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Multi-Cloud, provides the definition of multi-cloud and why companies have a multi-cloud strategy.

Chapter 2, Collecting Business Requirements, discusses how enterprises could collect requirements using various enterprise architecture methodologies and how they can accelerate business results by implementing a multi-cloud strategy.

Chapter 3, Starting the Multi-Cloud Journey, explains how businesses can start developing and implementing cloud platforms, describing the steps in transition and transformation.

Chapter 4, Service Designs for Multi-Cloud, discusses governance in multi-cloud using the Cloud Adoption Frameworks of cloud providers.

Chapter 5, Managing the Enterprise Cloud Architecture, covers the architecture principles of various domains, such as security, data, and applications. You will learn how to create an enterprise architecture for multi-cloud.

Chapter 6, Controlling the Foundation Using Well-Architected Frameworks, explains how to define policies to manage the landing zone and get a deeper understanding of handling accounts in landing zones. The Well-Architectured Frameworks of cloud providers are used as guidance in setting up landing zones in various clouds.

Chapter 7, Designing Applications for Multi-Cloud, covers how to gather and validate business requirements for the resilience and performance of applications in the cloud.

Chapter 8, Creating a Foundation for Data Platforms, discusses the basic architecture of data lakes and considers the various solutions that cloud providers offer. You will also learn about the challenges that come with collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data.

Chapter 9, Creating a Foundation for IoT, explores the architecture principles of an IoT ecosystem and discusses how the cloud can help in managing IoT devices. We will explore some of these cloud solutions and also look at crucial elements in IoT, such as connectivity and security.

Chapter 10, Managing Costs with FinOps, focuses on the basics of financial operations in the cloud – for instance, the provisioning of resources and the costs that come with the deployment of resources.

Chapter 11, Maturing FinOps, talks about the transformation to managed FinOps in an organization by setting up a FinOps team, which has a major task in the adoption of the FinOps principles that we discussed in chapter 10.

Chapter 12, Cost Modeling in the Cloud, teaches how to develop and implement a cost model that allows organizations to identify cloud costs (showback) and allocate (chargeback) costs to the budgets of teams or units.

Chapter 13, Implementing DevSecOps, discusses setting up DevOps practices to develop and deploy applications to the cloud, but always with security as a priority, making sure that code, pipelines, applications, and infrastructure remain secure at every stage of the release cycle.

Chapter 14, Defining Security Policies, introduces the security frameworks of cloud providers and overall frameworks such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) controls. You will learn how to define policies using these frameworks.

Chapter 15, Implementing Identity and Access Management, covers authenticating and authorizing identities. It also provides a good understanding of how to deal with least privileged accounts and the use of eligible accounts.

Chapter 16, Defining Security Policies for Data, starts with explaining data models and data classification. Next, you will learn how to protect data using cloud technologies such as encryption.

Chapter 17, Implementing and Integrating Security Monitoring, discusses the function and the need for integrated security monitoring, using SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response).

Chapter 18, Developing for Cloud with DevOps and DevSecOps, studies the principles of DevOps, how CI/CD pipelines work with push and pull mechanisms, and how pipelines are designed so that they fit multi-cloud environments. Next, you will learn how to secure DevOps processes using the principles of the DevSecOps maturity model and the most common security frameworks.

Chapter 19, Introducing AIOps and GreenOps, introduces the concept of Artificial Intelligence Operations (AIOps) and how enterprises can optimize their cloud environments using AIOps. You will also learn about achieving sustainability in the cloud using GreenOps.

Chapter 20, Conclusion: The Future of Multi-Cloud, provides a peek into the future of emerging clouds and how enterprises can manage the growth of cloud technology within their organizations. The chapter contains sections about SRE as a method to ensure the stability of systems, while development is done at high speed.

To get the most out of this book

It’s recommended to have a basic understanding of IT architecture and more specific cloud architecture. Architects are advised to study the foundation of enterprise architecture, for instance, TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework).Since this book also covers aspects of service management as part of governance, it’s also recommended to have knowledge about IT service management (ITSM). Common basic knowledge about cloud patterns in public and private clouds is assumed.All chapters contain a Further reading section that provides information on more in-depth literature about topics discussed in the chapters.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/pDhXa.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example: “Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system.”

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. For example: “Select System info from the Administration panel.”

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: Email [email protected] and mention the book’s title in the subject of your message. If you have questions about any aspect of this book, please email us at [email protected].

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you reported this to us. Please visit http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, click Submit Errata, and fill in the form.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit http://authors.packtpub.com.

Share your thoughts

Once you’ve read Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects, Second Edition, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.

Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we’re delivering excellent quality content.

Join us on Discord!

Read this book alongside other users, cloud experts, authors, and like-minded professionals.Ask questions, provide solutions to other readers, chat with the authors via. Ask Me Anything sessions and much more.

Scan the QR code or visit the link to join the community now.

https://packt.link/cloudanddevops

Download a free PDF copy of this book

Thanks for purchasing this book!

Do you like to read on the go but are unable to carry your print books everywhere? Is your eBook purchase not compatible with the device of your choice?

Don’t worry, now with every Packt book you get a DRM-free PDF version of that book at no cost.

Read anywhere, any place, on any device. Search, copy, and paste code from your favorite technical books directly into your application. 

The perks don’t stop there, you can get exclusive access to discounts, newsletters, and great free content in your inbox daily

Follow these simple steps to get the benefits:

Scan the QR code or visit the link below

https://packt.link/free-ebook/9781804616734

Submit your proof of purchaseThat’s it! We’ll send your free PDF and other benefits to your email directly

Contents

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Get in touch

Introduction to Multi-Cloud

Understanding multi-cloud concepts

Multi-cloud—more than just public and private

Introducing the main players in the field

Public clouds

Private clouds

VMware

OpenStack

AWS Outposts

Google Anthos

Azure Stack

Azure Arc

Emerging players

Evaluating cloud service models

IaaS

PaaS

SaaS

FaaS

CaaS

XaaS

Setting out a real strategy for multi-cloud

Gathering requirements for multi-cloud

Using TOGAF for requirements management

Listening to the Voice of the Customer

Defining architecture using QFD and the HOQ

Understanding the business challenges of multi-cloud

Setting the scene for cloud transformation

Addressing organizational challenges

Organizing the skills of the architect

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Collecting Business Requirements

Analyzing the enterprise strategy for the cloud

Shifting to a subscription-based economy

Considering cloud adoption from enterprise architecture

Long-term planning

Financial structure

Fitting cloud technology to business requirements

Business planning

Financial planning

Understanding the cost of delay

Moving to the benefit of opportunity

Technical planning

Applying the value streams of IT4IT

Keeping track of cloud developments—focusing on the business strategy

Creating a comprehensive business roadmap

Mapping the business roadmap to a cloud-fit strategy

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Starting the Multi-Cloud Journey

Understanding cloud vocabulary

Planning assessments

Executing technology mapping and governance

Keeping track of innovation

Adopting innovations

Defining roadmaps and business alignment

Planning transition and transformation

Starting the build

Setting up simple connectivity

Setting up landing zones

Exploring options for transformation

From monolith to microservices

From machines to serverless

Containers and multi-cloud container orchestration

Keeping the infrastructure consistent

Summary

Questions

Service Designs for Multi-Cloud

Introducing the scaffold for multi-cloud environments

Working with Well-Architected Frameworks

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Security

Cost management

Monitoring

Automation

Understanding cloud adoption

Stage 1—Defining a business strategy and business case

Stage 2—Creating your team

Stage 3—Assessment

Stage 4—Defining the architecture

Stage 5—Engaging with cloud providers; getting financial controls in place

Stage 6—Building and configuring the landing zone

Stage 7—Migrating and transforming

Translating business KPIs into cloud SLAs

Defining availability

Comparing service levels between providers

Using cloud adoption frameworks to align between cloud providers

Understanding identities and roles in the cloud

Creating the service design and governance model

Requirements

RAID

Service decomposition

Roles and responsibilities

Governance model

Support model

Processes

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Managing the Enterprise Cloud Architecture

Defining architecture principles for multi-cloud

Using quality attributes in architecture

Defining principles from use cases

Business principles

Principles for security and compliance

Data principles

Application principles

Infrastructure and technology principles

Principles for processes

Creating the architecture artifacts

Creating a business vision

Enterprise architecture

Principles catalog

Requirements catalog

High-level design

Low-level design

Planning transition and transformation

Change management and validation as the cornerstone

Validating the architecture

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Controlling the Foundation Using Well-Architected Frameworks

Understanding BaseOps and the foundational concepts

Defining and implementing the base infrastructure—the landing zone

Defining standards and guardrails for the base infrastructure

Building the landing zone with Well-Architected and Cloud Adoption principles

Enterprise-scale in Azure

BaseOps architecture patterns

Managing the base infrastructure

Implementing and managing connectivity

Implementing Azure ExpressRoute

Implementing AWS Direct Connect

Implementing Google Dedicated Interconnect

Implementing Alibaba Express Connect

Implementing direct connectivity in OCI

Accessing environments in public clouds

Defining and managing infrastructure automation tools and processes

Defining and implementing monitoring and management tools

Supporting operations

Managing the landing zones using policies

Managing basic operations in Azure

Managing basic operations in AWS

Managing basic operations in GCP

Managing basic operations in Alibaba Cloud

Managing basic operations in OCI

Understanding the need for demarcation

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Designing Applications for Multi-Cloud

Architecting for resilience and performance

Starting with business requirements

Understanding data risks

Understanding application risks

Understanding technological risks

Using the principles of the 12-factor app

Accelerating application design with PaaS

Designing SaaS solutions

Performance KPIs in a public cloud—what’s in it for you?

Optimizing your multi-cloud environment

Optimizing environments using Azure Advisor

Using Trusted Advisor for optimization in AWS

Optimizing GCP with Cloud Trace and Cloud Debugger

Optimizing in OCI

Use case: creating solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery

Creating backups in the Azure cloud with Azure Backup and Site Recovery

Backing up non-Azure systems

Understanding Azure Site Recovery

Working with AWS backup and disaster recovery

Creating policy-based backup plans

Creating tag-based backup plans

Hybrid backup in AWS

AWS disaster recovery and cross-region backup

Creating backup plans in GCP

Disaster recovery planning

Creating backups in OCI

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Creating a Foundation for Data Platforms

Choosing the right platform for data

Azure Data Lake and Data Factory

AWS Data Lake and Redshift

Google’s data lake and BigLake

Alibaba Cloud Lakehouse

Oracle Big Data Service

Building and sizing a data platform

Designing for interoperability and portability

Overcoming the challenges of data gravity

Introducing the principles of data mesh

Managing the foundation for data lakes

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Creating a Foundation for IoT

Choosing the right platform for IoT

Azure IoT Hub

AWS IoT Core, Edge Manager, and IoT Greengrass

Google Cloud IoT Core

Alibaba IoT Platform

Monitoring IoT ecosystems

Designing for connectivity to the cloud

Connecting IoT with IPv6, LoRa, and 5G

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Managing Costs with FinOps

Understanding the principles of FinOps

Define guidelines for the provisioning of cloud resources

Deploying resources in Azure using ARM

Deploying resources in AWS using CloudFormation and OpsWorks

Deploying resources in GCP using Deployment Manager

Deploying to Alibaba using Terraform

Deploying resources to Oracle Cloud

Define cost policies for provisioning

Using the Azure pricing calculator

Using the AWS calculator

Using the GCP instance pricing calculator

Understanding pricing in Alibaba Cloud

Using the cost estimator in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Understanding account hierarchy

Enterprise enrolment in Azure

Organizations in AWS

Organizations in GCP

Account hierarchy in other clouds

Understanding license agreements

Define tagging standards

Validate and manage billing

Using cost management and billing in Azure

Using AWS Cost Management for billing

Using billing options in GCP

Validating invoices

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Maturing FinOps

Setting up a FinOps team

Using maturity models for FinOps

Introducing cost-aware design

Transformation to managed FinOps in multi-cloud

Avoiding pitfalls in FinOps transformation

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Cost Modeling in the Cloud

Evaluating the types of cloud costs

Cost coverage

Cloud rates

Amortized and fully loaded costs

Building a cost model

Working principles of showback and chargeback

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Implementing DevSecOps

Understanding the need for DevSecOps

Starting with implementing a DevSecOps culture

Setting up CI/CD

Working with CI/CD in multi-cloud

Exploring tools for CI/CD

Azure DevOps

AWS CodePipeline

Google Cloud Build

CI/CD in Alibaba Cloud

CI/CD in OCI

Tools for multi-cloud container orchestration and application development

Following the principles of Security by Design

Securing development and operations using automation

Summary

Questions

Further Reading

Defining Security Policies

Understanding security policies

Understanding security frameworks

Understanding the dynamics of security and compliance

Defining the baseline for security policies

Implementing security policies

Implementing security policies in Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Implementing security policies in AWS Security Hub

Implementing security policies in GCP Security Command Center

Implementing security policies in Alibaba Cloud

Implementing security policies in OCI

Managing security policies

Manage risks with Cloud Security Posture Management

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Implementing Identity and Access Management

Understanding identity and access management

Using a central identity store with Active Directory

Designing access management across multi-cloud

Working with least-privilege access

Exploring Privileged Access Management (PAM)

PAM on cloud platforms

Enabling account federation in multi-cloud

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Defining Security Policies for Data

Storing data in multi-cloud concepts

Exploring storage technologies

Understanding data protection in the cloud

Understanding data encryption

Securing access, encryption, and storage keys

Using encryption and keys in Azure

Using encryption and keys in AWS

Using encryption and keys in GCP

Implementing encryption in OCI and Alibaba Cloud

Securing raw data for big data modeling 

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Implementing and Integrating Security Monitoring

Understanding SIEM and SOAR

Differentiating SIEM and SOAR

Initiating a Security Operations Center

Setting up the requirements for integrated security

Implementing the security model

Exploring multi-cloud monitoring suites

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Developing for Multi-Cloud with DevOps and DevSecOps

Introducing DevOps and CI/CD

Getting started with CI/CD

Working under version control

Using push and pull principles in CI

Pushing the code directly to the main branch

Pushing code to forks of the main

Best practices for working with CI/CD

Using the DevSecOps Maturity Model

Manage traceability and auditability 

Automating security best practices using frameworks

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Introducing AIOps and GreenOps in Multi-Cloud

Understanding the concept of AIOps

Optimizing cloud environments using AIOps

Exploring AIOps tools for multi-cloud

Introducing GreenOps

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Conclusion: The Future of Multi-Cloud

The growth and adoption of multi-cloud

Understanding the concept of SRE

Working with risk analysis in SRE

Applying monitoring principles in SRE

Applying principles of SRE to multi-cloud—building and operating distributed systems

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Other Books You May Enjoy

Index

Landmarks

Cover

Index

1

Introduction to Multi-Cloud

Multi-cloud is a hot topic with companies. Most companies are already multi-cloud, sometimes even without realizing it. They have Software as a Service (SaaS) such as Office 365 from Microsoft and Salesforce, for instance, next to applications that they host in a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It’s all part of the digital transformation that companies are going through, that is, creating business agility by adopting cloud services where companies develop a best-of-breed strategy: picking the right cloud service for specific business functions. The answer might be multi-cloud, rather than going for a single cloud provider.

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, AWS, and GCP, next to the different on-premises variants of these platforms, such as Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, Google Anthos, and some emerging players.

The most important thing before starting the transformation to multi-cloud is gathering requirements, making sure a company is doing the right thing and making the right choices. Concepts such as The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) will be discussed as tools to capture the voice of the customer (VOC). Lastly, you will learn that any transformation starts with people. The final section discusses the changes to the organization itself needed to execute the digital transformation.

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

Understanding multi-cloud conceptsMulti-cloud—more than just public and privateSetting out a real strategy for multi-cloudIntroducing the main players in the fieldEvaluating cloud service modelsGathering requirements for multi-cloudUnderstanding the business challenges of multi-cloud

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 at 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 datacenters 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 datacenters. 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 datacenters or in self-owned, on-premises datacenters. 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. These are public clouds: providers that offer IT services on demand from centralized platforms using the public internet. They are centralized platforms that provide IT services such as compute, storage, and networking but distributed across datacenters around the globe. The cloud provider is responsible for managing these datacenters and, with that, the cloud. Companies “rent” the services, without the need to invest in datacenters themselves.

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, you 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 you have a brand-new smartphone set to its factory defaults and you have it connected to the outside world. Ready to go? Probably not. You probably want to have all sorts of services delivered to your 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, they will work on different phones with different versions of mobile operating systems such as iOS or Android.

You will also very likely want to configure these apps according to your personal needs and wishes. Lastly, you need to be able to access the data on your 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, you, the user of the phone, don’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 mirrors the concept of the cloud, where the smartphone in our analogy is the actual integrated landing zone, where literally everything comes together, providing a seamless user experience.

How is this an analogy for multi-cloud? The first time we enter a portal for any public cloud, we will notice that there’s not much to see. We have a platform—the cloud itself—and we probably also have connectivity through the internet, so we can reach the portal. But we don’t want everyone to be able to see our applications and data on this platform, so we need to configure it for our specific usage. After we’ve done that, we can load our applications and the data on to the platform. Only authorized people can access those applications and that data. However, just like the user of a smartphone, a company might choose to have applications and data on other platforms. They will be able to connect to applications on a different platform.

The company might even decide to migrate applications to a different platform. Think of the possibility of having Facebook on both an iPhone and an Android phone; with just one Facebook account, the user will see the same data, even when the platforms—the phones—use different operating systems.

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 homogeneous and multi-cloud platforms are heterogeneous. Homogeneous here means that the cloud solutions belong to one stack, for instance, the Azure public cloud with Azure Stack on-premises. Heterogeneous, then, would mean combining Azure and AWS, for instance.

Key definitions are:

Hybrid: Combines on-premises and cloud.Multi-cloud: Two or more cloud providers.Private: Resources dedicated to one company or user.Public: Resources are shared (note, this doesn’t mean anyone has access to your data. In the public cloud, we will have separate tenants, but these tenants will share resources, for instance, in networking).

For now, we will keep it very simple: a hybrid environment combines an on-premises stack—a private cloud—with a public cloud. It is a very common deployment model within enterprises and most consultancy firms have concluded that these hybrid deployments will be the most implemented future model of the cloud.

Two obvious reasons for hybrid—a mixture between the public and private clouds—are security and latency, besides the fact that a lot of companies already had on-premises environments before the cloud entered the market.

To start with security: 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 European Union (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 Part 4 of this book in Chapters 13 to 18, where we talk about security, since security and data privacy are of the 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 improved massively in recent 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 to be sent. For this functionality, items have a barcode or QR code that can be scanned with RFID or the like. These systems have to be close to the production floor in the warehouse or—if you do host them in the cloud—accessible through really high-speed, dedicated connections on fast, responsive systems.

These are pretty simple and easy-to-understand examples, but the issue really comes to life if you start thinking about the medical systems used in operating theatres, or the systems controlling power plants. It is not that useful to have an all-public-cloud, cloud-first, or cloud-only strategy for quite a number of companies and institutions. That goes for hospitals, utility companies, and also for companies in less critical environments.

Yet, all of these companies discovered that the development of applications was way more agile in the public cloud. Usually, that’s where cloud adoption starts: with developers creating environments and apps in public clouds. It’s where hybrid IT is born: the use of private systems in private datacenters for critical production systems that host applications with sensitive data that need to be on-premises for latency reasons, while the public cloud is used to enable the fast, agile development of new applications. That’s where new cloud service models come into the picture. These models are explored in the next section.

The terms multi-cloud and hybrid get mixed up a lot and the truth is that a solution can be a mix. You can have, as an example, dedicated private hosts in Azure and AWS, hence running private servers in a public cloud. Or, run cloud services on a private host that sits in a private datacenter, for instance, with Azure Stack or AWS Outposts. That can lead to confusion. Still, when we discuss hybrid in this book, we refer to an on-premises environment combined with a public cloud. Multi-cloud is when we have two or more cloud providers.

Introducing the main players in the field

We have been talking about public and private clouds. Although it’s probably clear what we commonly understand by these terms, it’s still a good idea to have a very clear definition of both. We adhere to the definition as presented on the Microsoft website (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-cloud-computing): the public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet, making them available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them. The private cloud is defined as computing services offered either over the internet or a private internal network and only to select users instead of the general public. There are many more definitions, but these serve our purpose very well.

Public clouds

In the public cloud, the best-known providers are AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud, next to a number of public clouds that have OpenStack as their technological foundation. An example of OpenStack is Rackspace. These are all public clouds that fit the definition that we just gave, but they also have some major differences.

AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer a wide variety of managed services to build environments, but they all differ very much in the way you apply the technology. In short: the concepts are more or less alike, but under the hood, these are completely different beasts. It’s exactly this that makes managing multi-cloud solutions complex.

In this book, we will mainly focus on the major players in the multi-cloud portfolio.

Private clouds

Most companies are planning to move, or are actually in the midst of moving, their workloads to the cloud. In general, they have a selected number of major platforms that they choose to host the workloads: Azure, AWS, GCP, and that’s about it. Fair enough, there are more platforms, but the three mentioned are the most dominant ones, and will continue to be throughout the forthcoming decades, if we look at analysts’ reports. Yet, we will also address Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Alibaba Cloud in this book when appropriate and when adding valuable extra information, since both clouds have gained quite some market growth over the recent years.

As we already found out in the previous paragraphs, in planning for and migrating workloads to these platforms, organizations also discover that it gets complex. Even more important, there are more and more regulations in terms of compliance, security, and privacy that force these companies to think twice before they bring our data onto these platforms. And it’s all about the data, in the end. It’s the most valuable asset in any company—next to people.

In the private cloud, VMware seems to be the dominant platform, next to environments that have Microsoft with Hyper-V technology as their basis. Yet, Microsoft is pushing customers more and more toward consumption in Azure, and where systems need to be kept on-premises, they have a broad portfolio available with Azure Stack and Azure Arc, which we will discuss in a bit more detail later in this chapter.

Especially in European governmental environments, OpenStack still seems to do very well, to avoid having data controlled or even viewed by non-European companies. However, the adoption and usage of OpenStack seem to be declining.

The following diagram provides an example of a multi-cloud stack, dividing private from public clouds.

Figure 1.2: An example multi-cloud portfolio: the main players

In this section, we will look briefly at both VMware and OpenStack as private stack foundations. After that, we’ll have a deeper look at AWS Outposts and Google Anthos. Basically, both propositions extend the public clouds of AWS and GCP into a privately owned datacenter. Next to this, we have to mention Azure Arc, which extends Azure to anywhere, either on-premises onto other clouds.

Outposts is an appliance that comes as a preconfigured rack with compute, storage, and network facilities. Anthos by Google is more a set of components that can be utilized to specifically host container platforms in on-premises environments using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Finally, in this section, we will have a look at the Azure Stack portfolio.

VMware

In essence, VMware is still a virtualization technology. It started off with the virtualization of x86-based physical servers, enabling multiple virtual machines Virtual Machines (VMs) on one physical host. Later, VMware introduced the same concept to storage with virtualized SAN (vSAN) and network virtualization and security (NSX), which virtualizes the network, making it possible to adopt micro-segmentation in private clouds.

The company has been able to constantly find ways to move along with the shift to the cloud—as an example, by developing a proposition together with AWS where VMware private clouds can be seamlessly extended to the public cloud. The same applies to Azure: the joint offering is Azure VMware Solution (AVS).

VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) was a jointly developed proposition by AWS and VMware, but today Azure and VMware also supply migration services to migrate VMware workloads to Azure. VMware, acquired by Broadcom in 2022, has developed new services to stay relevant in the cloud. It has become a strong player in the field of containerization with the Tanzu portfolio, for instance. Over the last few years, the company has also strengthened its position in the security domain, again targeting the multi-cloud stack.

OpenStack

There absolutely are benefits to OpenStack. It’s a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly used as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). OpenStack uses KVM as its main hypervisor, although there are more hypervisors available for OpenStack. It was—and still is, with a group of companies and institutions—popular since it offers a stable, scalable solution while avoiding vendor lock-in on the major cloud and technology providers. Major integrators and system providers such as IBM and Fujitsu adopted OpenStack in their respective cloud platforms, Bluemix and K5 (K5 was decommissioned internationally in 2018).

However, although OpenStack is open source and can be completely tweaked and tuned to specific business needs, it is also complex, and companies find it cumbersome to manage. Most of these OpenStack platforms do not have the richness of solutions that, for example, Azure, AWS, and GCP offer to their clients. Over the last few years, OpenStack seems to have lost its foothold in the enterprise world, yet it still has a somewhat relevant position and certain aspects are therefore considered in this book.

AWS Outposts

Everything you run on the AWS public cloud, you can now run on an appliance, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), databases, and even Kubernetes clusters with Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It all seamlessly integrates with the virtual private cloud (VPC) that you would have deployed in the public cloud, using the same APIs and controls. That is, in a nutshell, AWS Outposts: the AWS public cloud on-premises.

One question might be what this means for the VMConAWS proposition that both VMware and AWS have in their portfolio. VMConAWS actually extends the private cloud to the public cloud, based on HCX by VMware. VMware uses bare-metal instances in AWS to which it deploys vSphere, vSAN storage, and NSX for software-defined networking.

You can also use AWS services on top of the configuration of VMConAWS through integration with AWS. Outposts works exactly the other way around: bringing AWS to the private cloud. The portfolio for Outposts is growing rapidly. Customers can buy small appliances with single servers and also so-called rack solutions. In both cases, the infrastructure is completely managed by AWS.

Google Anthos

Anthos brings Google Cloud—or more accurately, GKE—to the on-premises datacenter, just as Azure Stack does for Azure and Outposts for AWS, but it focuses on the use of Kubernetes as a landing platform, moving and converting workloads directly into containers using GKE. It’s not a standalone box like Azure Stack or Outposts. The solution runs on top of virtualized machines using vSphere and is more of a Platform of a Service (PaaS) solution. Anthos really accelerates the transformation of applications to more cloud-native environments, using open-source technology including Istio for microservices and Knative for the scaling and deployment of cloud-native apps on Kubernetes.

More information on the specifics of Anthos can be found at https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke/docs/on-prem/how-to/vsphere-requirements-basic.

Azure Stack

The Azure Stack portfolio contains Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Stack Hub, and Stack Edge.

The most important feature of Azure Stack HCI is that it can run “disconnected” from Azure, running offline without internet connectivity. Stack HCI is delivered as a service, providing the latest security and feature updates.

To put it very simply: HCI works like the commonly known branch office server. Basically, HCI is a box that contains compute power, storage, and network connections. The box holds Hyper-V-based virtualized workloads that you can manage with Windows Admin Center. So, why would you want to run this as Azure Stack then? Well, Azure Stack HCI also has the option to connect to Azure services, such as Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, Microsoft Defender (formerly Azure Security Center), and Azure Monitor.

It’s a very simple solution that only requires Microsoft-validated hardware, the installation of the Azure Stack operating system plus Windows Admin Center, and optionally an Azure account to connect to specific Azure cloud services.

Pre-warning: it might get a bit complicated from this point onward. Azure Stack HCI is also the foundation of Azure Stack Hub. Yet, Hub is a different solution. Whereas you can run Stack HCI standalone, Hub as a solution is integrated with the Azure public cloud—and that’s really a different ballgame. It’s not possible to upgrade HCI to Hub.

Azure Stack Hub is an extension of Azure that brings the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment. Almost everything you can do in the public cloud of Microsoft, you could also deploy on Hub: from VMs to apps, all managed through the Azure portal or even PowerShell. It all really works like Azure, including things such as configuring and updating fault domains. Hub also supports having an availability set with a maximum of three fault domains to be consistent with Azure. This way, you can create high availability on Hub just as you would in Azure.

The perfect use case for Hub and the Azure public cloud would be to do development on the public cloud and move production to Hub, should apps or VMs need to be hosted on-premises for compliance reasons. The good news is that you can configure your pipeline in such a manner that development and testing can be executed on the public cloud and run deployment of the validated production systems, including the desired state configuration, on Hub. This will work fine since both entities of the Azure platform use the Azure resource providers in a consistent way.

There are a few things to be aware of, though. The compute resource provider will create its own VMs on Hub. In other words: it does not copy the VM from the public cloud to Hub. The same applies to network resources. Hub will create its own network features such as load balancers, vNets, and network security groups (NSGs). As for storage, Hub allows you to deploy all storage forms that you would have available on the Azure public cloud, such as blobs, queues, and tables. Obviously, we will discuss all of this in much more detail in this book, so don’t worry if a number of terms don’t sound familiar at this time.

One last Stack product is Stack Edge. Edge makes it easy to send data to Azure. But Edge does more: it runs containers to enable data analyses, perform queries, and filter data at edge locations. Therefore, Edge supports Azure VMs and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters, which you can run containers on.

Edge, for that matter, is quite a sophisticated solution since it also integrates with Azure Machine Learning (AML). You can build and train machine learning models in Azure, run them in Azure Stack Edge, and send the datasets back to Azure. For this, the Edge solution is equipped with the Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) required to speed up building and (re)training the models.

Having said this, the obvious use case comes with the implementation of data analytics and machine learning where you don’t want raw data to be uploaded to the public cloud straight away.

Azure Arc

There’s one more service that needs to be discussed at this point and that’s Azure Arc, launched at Ignite 2019. Azure Arc allows you to manage and govern at scale the following resource types hosted outside of Azure: servers, Kubernetes clusters, and SQL Server instances. In addition, Azure Arc allows you to run Azure data services anywhere using Kubernetes as clusters for containers, use GitOps to deploy configuration across the Kubernetes clusters from Git repositories, and manage these non-Azure workloads as if they were fully deployed on Azure itself.

If you want to connect a machine to Arc, you need to install an agent on that machine. It will then get a resource ID and become part of a resource group in your Azure tenant. However, this won’t happen until you’ve configured some settings in the network, such as a proxy allowing for traffic from and to Arc-controlled servers, and registered the appropriate resource providers. The Microsoft.HybridCompute, Microsoft.GuestConfiguration, and Microsoft.HybridConnectivity resource providers must be registered on your subscription. This only has to be done once.

If you perform the actions successfully, then you can have non-Azure machines managed through Azure. In practice, this means that you perform many operational functions, just as you would with native Azure virtual machines. That sort of defines the use case: managing the non-Azure machines in line with the same policies as the Azure machines. These do not necessarily have to be on-premises. That’s likely the best part of Arc: Azure Arc-enabled servers let you manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, on your corporate network, or on another cloud provider (such as AWS or GCP, but not exclusively).

With that last remark on Arc, we’ve come to the core of the multi-cloud discussion, and that’s integration. All of the platforms that we’ve studied in this chapter have advantages, disadvantages, dependencies, and even specific use cases. Hence, we see enterprises experimenting with and deploying workloads in more than one cloud. That’s not just to avoid cloud vendor lock-in: it’s mainly because there’s not a “one size fits all” solution.

In short, it should be clear that it’s really not about cloud-first. It’s about getting cloud-fit, that is, getting the best out of an ever-increasing variety of cloud solutions. This book will hopefully help you to master working with a mix of these solutions.

Emerging players

Looking at the cloud market, it’s clear that it is dominated by a few major players, that is, the ones that were mentioned before: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. However, a number of players are emerging in both the public and private clouds, for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is geographical and that finds its cause in compliance rules. Some industries or companies in specific countries are not allowed to use, for instance, American cloud providers. Or the provider must have a local presence in a specific country.

From China, two major players have emerged to the rest of the world: Alibaba Cloud and Tencent. Both have been leading providers in China for many years, but are also globally available, but they focus on the Chinese market. Alibaba Cloud, especially, can certainly compete with the major American providers, offering a wide variety of services.

In Europe, a new initiative has recently started with Gaia-X, providing a pure European cloud, based in the EU. Gaia-X seems to concentrate mainly on the healthcare industry to allow European healthcare institutions to use a public cloud and still have privacy-sensitive patient data hosted within the EU.

Finally, big system integrators have stepped into the cloud market as well. A few have found niches in the market, such as IBM Cloud, which collaborates with Red Hat. Japanese technology provider Fujitsu did offer global cloud services with K5 for a while, offering a fully OpenStack public cloud, but found itself not being able to compete with Azure or AWS without enormous investments.

For specific use cases, a number of these clouds will offer good solutions, but the size and breadth of the services typically don’t match those of the major public providers.

Where appropriate, new players will be discussed in this book. In the next section, we will first study the various cloud service models.

Evaluating cloud service models

In the early days, the cloud was merely another datacenter that hosted a multitude of customers, sharing resources such as compute power, network, and storage. The cloud has evolved over the years, now offering a variety of service models. In this section, you will learn the fundamentals of these models.

IaaS

IaaS is likely still the best-known service model of the cloud. Typically, enterprises still start with IaaS when they initiate the migration to cloud providers. In practice, this means that enterprises perform a lift and shift of their (virtual) machines to resources that are hosted in the cloud. The cloud provider will manage only the infrastructure for the customer: network, storage, compute, and the virtualization layer. The latter is important, since customers will share physical resources in the cloud. These resources—for instance, servers—are virtualized so they can host multiple instances.

PaaS

With PaaS cloud providers take more responsibility over resources, now including operating systems and middleware. A good example is a database platform. Customers don’t need to take care of the database platform, but simply run a database instance on a database platform. The database software, for example, MySQL or PostgreSQL, is taken care of by the cloud provider, including the underlying operating systems.

SaaS

SaaS is generally perceived as the future model for cloud services. It basically means that the cloud provider manages everything in the software stack, from the infrastructure to the actual application with all its components, including data. Software updates, bug fixes, and infrastructure maintenance are all handled by the cloud provider. The user, who typically uses the application through some form of subscription, connects to the app through a portal or API without installing software on local machines.

FaaS

FaaS refers to a cloud service that enables the development and management of serverless computing applications. Serverless does not mean that there are no services involved, but developers can program services without having to worry about setting up and maintaining a server: that’s taken care of by the cloud provider. The big advantage is that the programmed service only uses the exact amount of, for instance, CPU and memory, instead of an entire virtual machine.

CaaS

A growing number of enterprises are adopting container technology to host, run, and scale their applications. To run containers, developers must set up a runtime environment for these containers. Typically, this is done with Kubernetes, which has developed as the industry standard to host, orchestrate, and run containers. Setting up Kubernetes clusters can be complex and time-consuming. Container as a Service (CaaS) is the solution. CaaS provides an easy way to set up container clusters.

XaaS

Anything as a Service (XaaS) is a term used to express the idea that users can have everything as a service. The concept is widely spread with, for instance, Hardware as a Service (HaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS), or Database as a Service (DBaaS). This is not limited to IT, though. The general idea is that companies will offer services and products in an as a service model, using the cloud as the digital enabler. Examples are food delivery to homes, ordering taxis, or consulting a doctor using apps.

Although we will touch upon SaaS and containers, we will focus mainly on IaaS and PaaS as starting points to adopt multi-cloud. With that in mind, we can start by setting out our multi-cloud strategy.

Setting out a real strategy for multi-cloud

A cloud strategy emerges from the business and the business goals. Business goals, for example, could include the following:

Creating more brand awarenessReleasing products to the market fasterImproving profit margins

Business strategies often start with increasing revenue as a business goal. In all honesty: that should indeed be a goal; otherwise, you’ll be out of business before you know it. The strategy should focus on how to generate and increase revenue. We will explore more on this in Chapter 2, Business Acceleration Using a Multi-Cloud Strategy.

How do you get from business goals to defining an IT strategy? That is where enterprise architecture comes into play. The most used framework for enterprise architecture is TOGAF