What are hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures, and how can they benefit your business?
Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures have become increasingly popular in recent years, as businesses seek to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing while still maintaining control over their data and applications. While the terms "hybrid cloud" and "multi-cloud" are often used interchangeably, there are important differences between the two.
Hybrid cloud infrastructure combines public cloud services with private cloud or on-premise infrastructure. Using both gives flexibility in terms of costs but also compliance, since many companies are required not to keep their sensitive data on public clouds due to regulations. Cost-wise there are cases when it is cheaper to use a managed service - for example Kubernetes control plane since it takes the burden of deployment and maintenance away from your team, on the other hand if you have constant need for high compute power usually it is cheaper to buy your own hardware if we are talking about 3+ years.
Multi-cloud infrastructure is one in which an organization uses multiple cloud providers, typically for different applications or services. This approach can provide benefits such as increased flexibility, as organizations can choose the cloud provider that best meets the specific needs of each application, and especially resilience in case of failures. However, it can also lead to complexity in managing multiple cloud environments, and this is something which is usually done by big companies.
On another note, there has been some critique of the “cloud first” mentality that has become prevalent in the tech industry. Some companies are deciding to “leave the cloud” moving their infrastructure onto their own servers, due to a combination of cost, control, and performance concerns. From our perspective hybrid cloud/on-premise infrastructure is more appropriate for businesses that need to adhere to government regulations or have high computational needs; while public cloud is more suited to variable traffic, relatively low resource needs and of course it provides benefits of easier scaling, redundancy/high availability and managed services provided out-of-the-box, most of these can be achieved also with private cloud/on-premise but would require bigger teams in order to support all of these features.
Overall, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud offer different benefits and challenges, and your organization should choose the approach that best fits your needs and goals, you just need to be aware of all the options in order to make an informed decision.
Say hi at hello@devolut.io, and together with our team of engineers we can come up with the appropriate architecture that will suit your application-specific needs!