Reducing the Complexity of a Multi-Cloud Environment

Kit Colbert

During the last few years, I’ve written and spoken a lot about the importance of developing a multi-cloud strategy. (See “The Cost of Cloud, and the Need for a Multi-Cloud Strategy,” “Cloud Infrastructure Transformation,” “VMware’s Approach to Multi-Cloud: A Strategy or an Inevitable Outcome? (Or both?)” and “Multi-Cloud: What to Expect in 2022”). Multi-cloud provides increased velocity, scale and choice by enabling enterprises to run applications and services across multiple clouds, including at the edge.

However, leveraging multiple cloud providers also ratchets up the level of complexity. Developers must employ different development tools and APIs for each one, making it difficult to manage app deployment, security and data. Utilizing additional clouds with their underlying technologies places additional strain on an enterprise’s technology personnel.

A common trend among companies leveraging multi-cloud is to build a set of services that drive various aspects of standardization across clouds, such as for DevSecOps, infrastructure (for example, Kubernetes), management and governance, and more. They do this to get the benefits of multi-cloud while also enabling certain levels of consistency. But instead of each company building its own services, wouldn’t it be nice if a set of multi-cloud services already existed?

This is where VMware Cross-Cloud Services come in. This family of SaaS services is designed to cover the breadth of the app lifecycle, including the underlying supporting infrastructure. They ease the pain involved with deploying apps and services across multiple clouds, enabling you to build, run, manage, connect, secure and access all of your applications on any cloud in the same way.

For example, consider DevSecOps consistency. Here, companies want a standard way to build, deploy, secure and operate apps on any cloud in the same way. Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) provides these foundational DevSecOps capabilities across clouds. It allows developers to iterate on their code quickly, without having to interface with the underlying cloud infrastructure — dramatically increasing developer velocity. Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations offers the ability to manage, monitor and secure Kubernetes clusters across clouds, as well.

Another example is failover and fail back. While public clouds are usually reliable, availability zones (AZs), or sometimes entire regions, go down from time to time. So, having the ability to rely on a secondary cloud — not just for backup, but for applications — is a great benefit. VMware Cross-Cloud Services supports this seamlessly. When the first cloud comes back up, VMware Cross-Cloud Services let you fail back.

A well-implemented multi-cloud architecture should deliver modularity, optionality and consistency to cloud administrators and developers, helping them manage and consume cloud services. To learn more about how VMware is reducing complexity in multi-cloud environments, watch our recent Multi-Cloud Briefing, which features both VMware technologists and customers who explain how they’re making multi-cloud work in their own organizations.

Kit Colbert is VMware’s Chief Technology Officer, driving technical strategy, innovation, evangelism and SaaS transformation across VMware’s engineering organization. Previously, he was VMware Cloud CTO, GM of Cloud-Native Apps.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.