Multi vs Hybrid vs Hybrid Multi-Cloud vs. Private Cloud

Introduction to Cloud Ecosystem

What is Multi-Cloud?

By using cloud computing, individuals and companies don't have to manage physical servers themselves or run software applications on their own machines. Source: Why Hybrid Multi-Cloud Reigns?

What is Hybrid Cloud?

It refers to a consonance between on-premise infrastructure, public cloud, and private clouds - such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or the Microsoft Azure, along with orchestration among numerous platforms. It's an Infrastructure Model that connects at least one of each Public and Private cloud. It enables the customer to have functional advantages such as application portability according to the cost and need and management control to develop a solo, flexible, and optimal cloud environment for the workload per the organization's needs.

What is Hybrid Multi-Cloud?

A corporation uses multiple different public cloud services in its solution, often from multiple different providers. Might use different clouds for various tasks to realize best-of-breed results or scale back vendor lock-in. Multiple clouds also give organizations peace of mind by minimizing dependence on anybody, often decreasing costs and increasing flexibility.

A hybrid cloud could also be an answer that mixes a private cloud with one or more public cloud services, with proprietary software enabling communication between each distinct service.

What is Hybrid Cloud Strategy?

Its strategy provides greater flexibility by moving workloads between cloud solutions as needs and costs fluctuate. Hybrid cloud deployment can also be if it uses several public clouds. It to offer the benefits of multiple deployment models at once.

Application is hosted with multiple cloud platforms, and each delivers a specific service. It can comprise public,hybrid and private cloud to achieve the Enterprise's end goals. What is Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud | Use-Cases

What is a Private Cloud?

A Private Cloud, more commonly known as an Internal or Corporate cloud, is a special type of cloud infrastructure explicitly provisioned for a single customer. It's an isolated, on-demand cloud deployment model with its cloud computing services and infrastructure hosting. These do not necessarily have to be deployed on-premises and managed on a service provider agreement between organizations. Multiple units inside the organization utilize the private cloud, and each is referred to as a consumer.

A set of criteria that need to be met have been defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Any computing system that meets these rules is considered a Private Cloud. Some important points include :

1. Provide on-demand self-service computing resources.
2. To enable and make the resources accessible from multiple varieties of devices.
3. Pool various resources and allow serving them in a multi-tenant fashion.
4. To have the ability to automatically and elastically scaling of resources.
5. The ability to evaluate and measure the uses of resources by various consumers.

Difference between the Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud, and Hybrid Multi-Cloud?

Why Organizations Choose a Hybrid Multi-Cloud Strategy?

There is a spread of reasons you'd take one or another path for various IT tasks. Choosing the proper hosting platform to match your compute resource requirements is the key to putting together an environment that is powerful, dynamic, scalable, and cost-effective. Increasingly, enterprises are turning to its solution to create such environments.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

Organizations committed to its strategy intentionally plan for agility and portability between multiple cloud providers. With the flexibility to transfer applications between multiple public cloud vendors, organizations are poised to require advantage of all providers' latest technologies. They should choose the best-performing or most cost-effective services for specific application workloads.

Overcoming Data Gravity

Organization stores an outsized volume of data with one cloud service provider. Data gravity could force you to deploy related apps and services with an equivalent provider – even when there are less expensive options available in another cloud. Overcoming data gravity is as simple as adopting the cloud-attached storage solution that connects to multiple clouds simultaneously. The simplest solutions minimize latency by hosting your data in close proximity to cloud data centers. By adopting a multi-cloud strategy and leveraging cloud services from quite one vendor, organizations can access new geographies to provide better application and data performance for his or her users, wherever they're located.

Flexibility

Organizations can store and maintain sensitive data privately, cloud deployments, or on-premise data centers to satisfy their data security and privacy obligations.

Cost-Performance Optimization

Some Organizations want the best within the budget. Hybrid Multi-Cloud strategy gives such freedom them. For example, it would enable an organization to need the advantage of AWS spot instances and stable computing power at a rock bottom price but still use low-priority VMs on Azure or the private cloud.

Cloud Governance is a set of rules. It applies specific policies or principles to the use of cloud computing services.This model aims to secure applications and data even if located distantly. Cloud Governance: The Big Challenges and Best Practices

Differentiating Hybrid vs. Multi-Cloud Strategy?

In a general sense of understanding, the two terms `Hybrid Cloud` and `Multi-cloud` can be safely interchanged, and the difference between them is minimal to none.

A major distinction can be said as :

1. The multi-cloud model can comprise any cloud architectures combinations. These models may or may not include an on-premise private cloud, whereas,
2. Its models include a definitive combination of public and local cloud or a differentiable privately hosted cloud.

Aside from this specific difference, some other aspects that may help in defining bounded differences between the two are :

Architectural Variance of Hybrid vs. Multi-Cloud

On one side, the Hybrid cloud model is a well-coupled integration of resources from private and public clouds, with a fast workflow among the systems. The co-relativity between the two counterparts in this equation must be compatible for the model to succeed. Also, the CSL and HL (Cloud software layer and Hypervisor layer) must be syncable with the opted public cloud for absolute operability between APIs and other services. These models are well suited for specific workloads and tasks like CloudBurst case and internal workload handling tasks, with well-managed demand shifts between the resources.

On the other spectrum of the equation, its infrastructure modeling is a quite comprehensive methodology that enables organizations to administer and leverage the billing and management of the services.

It is important to remember that the two models are not mutually exclusive, and by definition, a multi-cloud can be a hybrid cloud, and itcan have multiple clouds.

Cloud Integration

A vital difference is also visible in the sense that, in its architecture, the local on-premise private cloud is almost always integrated to an extent to the public cloud.

Whereas, for its configuration, the various individual clouds might not be integrated mainly due to the fact that organizations tend to shift workloads differently on different clouds.

Scalability of the Platform

It is a possible case that large upward changes in requirements of the organizations would likely require scaling of the physical infrastructure, which might take longer than a simple scaling of any VM (Virtual machine) within an already existing capability.

Cost Management

If we compare its model and Multi-cloud environments, it is mostly the case that Hybrid model implementation and management turns out expensive. This is mainly due to the requirement of additional infrastructure and bandwidth by the private clouds. This, in general, requires an upfront capital investment.

On top of that, the integration cost for local to cloud data centers is another expense to consider. Its environments that rely mainly on the public side cloud platform would be more cost-effective in terms of upfront investments and architectural setup.

The general case being, public cloud billing is based on actual usage and thus needs a lower level of configurational development. However, its model-based implementation on public cloud service may cost much more in the long run due to the "cost per usage factor," which includes storage, compute stack, networking, and data migrations and transfers.

Cloud-native application development is an approach to speed up building new applications, optimizing existing ones, and connecting all of them. Why Cloud Native Applications?

What are the Challenges of Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud?

1. Increased data management complexity and overhead: Control, tracking, and synchronization of knowledge become more complicated when data sets are deployed across multiple providers.
2. Data protection: Difficult to guard data that are distributed across complex infrastructures. Access control and data lifecycle management policies are harder to enforce across a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architecture.
3. Network: Network bandwidth and latency rates got to be taken into consideration when working with its architectures. Network connectivity is the only best way for the various clouds to connect.
4. Maintaining Security: Data that moves between and is accessed on multiple platforms adds increased risk to the organization. Security policies need to be reviewed, risk assessments made.

When is a Hybrid Cloud and Multi-cloud Infrastructure the Right Solution?

For being able to decide which infrastructure is best suited for your organization correctly. We must take into consideration the benefits that we are looking for. Below are some benefits that each model avails -

Hybrid Cloud

• Reliable Access: It give access to the data to be able to support the remote workforce better. All of your employees have access to the data anytime from anywhere. Using its strategy will give organizations the flexibility for supporting remote employees with on-demand access to data that is not tied to one central location.
• Reduced costs: Whenever demand spikes, the organizations can avoid colossal capital expenditure (and thus breaking the bank) to expand their infrastructure and pay only for the specific cloud resources they use.
• Improved scalability and control: Increased automation allows for adjusting cloud settings to respond automatically to changes in demand, performance optimization, and efficiency.
• Security and risk management:  Its strategy would give organizations control over their data and help improve security by reducing the potential exposure of data to threats. The organization can choose where and how to house its data and workloads. It would make it much easier to implement more robust technical security measures such as encryptions algos, automation controls, access controls, orchestrations, and endpoint security.

Multi-Cloud 

• Risk Reduction: If one of the cloud providers has a temporary service failure, the total performance would then decrease at that specific time. But with a multi-cloud strategy, we can switch to another vendor, thus handling the failure case.
• Finding the best-in-class multi-cloud providers at quite a competitive pricing: The gradual number of cloud service providers increased significantly over the last few years. If some of the policies of a specific provider do not match the organization, we can compare different providers. Then select the best offer that suits the organization the most. This way, we can achieve a very high level of agility.
• Automation & Scalability: The amount of data any organization works with does not matter much. With a multi-cloud strategy, we can store all of them. On the other hand, a multi-cloud strategy also helps organizations to be able to coordinate varying workloads and manage hybrid workflows concurrently.
• Robust Security: Each cloud provider is responsible for the security of their infrastructures, so we are ensured that they have all the capabilities for protecting the data.

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Summing up

• Read more about Spinnaker – Continuous Delivery Platform.
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