Understanding Cloud Agnostic Architecture and Strategies

The constantly expanding public cloud space makes it imperative for businesses to adopt a cloud strategy that supports their key enterprise goals. Most organizations today prefer to work with multiple cloud providers, primarily to prevent vendor lock-ins.  

A survey from Gartner shows that as many as 81% of companies use public cloud services from multiple providers. Businesses, therefore, are increasingly focussing on building multi-cloud strategies so that applications developed can consume services from multiple clouds.  

However, for a multi-cloud strategy to become successful, cloud agnostic architectures are essential.   

What is Cloud Agnostic Architecture? 

Cloud’s most significant advantage is its flexibility. The public cloud services, when running out of storage, can automatically scale it for you. However, cloud agnostic architecture takes this flexibility to a different stage. 

Cloud agnostic architecture focuses on designing applications, tools, or platforms that can run seamlessly in any cloud environment as they are compatible with any cloud infrastructure. They can also be moved to and from different cloud environments without operational issues. 

Organizations can efficiently run their applications and workloads in any public cloud, even while using various cloud services. Generally, organizations have preferences for their cloud setup and have a customized mix of open source tools that work better for different applications or services. While it complicates and increases the risk quotient for application management, it is much better than getting locked in by a single vendor. 

Companies can leverage cloud agnostic tools and platforms to ensure that their workflows and applications are secure, scalable, portable, flexible, and benefit from cutting-edge, open source technology that can meet core business needs. 

Open Source Cloud Agnostic Strategies 

Leading public cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are powered by different open source components, such as Java frameworks. These components are further integrated with other open source cloud services, such as Apache and Kubernetes. However, these public clouds are still not fully open source. Most of these companies do not provide access to their source code, setting limitations to the cloud’s extension and customization. 

Thus, open source cloud platforms emerged as an alternative for making large-scale improvements and customizations, allowing for building scalable infrastructures such as virtualized data centers and private clouds. 

Open source cloud infrastructure can be described as a vendor-agnostic approach to leveraging local hardware, public cloud resources, and open source cloud technologies to set up, manage, and operate a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. 

You may utilize several strategies to develop a cloud agnostic architecture for your organizations. Here are a few of the popular ones:  

First Automate 

With a cloud agnostic strategy, the workload for the DevOps team will grow significantly. Therefore, the automate-first method is the most crucial phase for a cloud-agnostic strategy since the infrastructure should be able to function with minimal manual intervention. A planned CI pipeline can be used to carry out this task. 

Infrastructure should be constructed with little to no manual intervention, and a CI pipeline should be available for easy integration and testing. Pipelines for deployment must also facilitate scheduled deployments with approvals. Open source tools such as Spinnaker and Jenkins can assist you with this deployment. 

Microservices 

Microservices architecture organizes an application as a collection of services broken down into small components, each serving a specific business function and interacting with the others. When applications are split into more manageable microservice parts, they are easier to design and maintain, especially if they are meant to be cloud agnostic. 

The microservice architecture enables the delivery of large, sophisticated applications in a timely, frequent, and dependable manner. Moreover, changes or additions to an organization’s technological stack are much easier to implement in a microservices environment. Swarm, Kubernetes, and Prometheus are a few from the pool of open source tools for this strategy. 

Containerisation  

Containers encapsulate all OS-level dependencies, configuration, runtime, libraries, and applications into a single execution. As a result, containers can be used easily and consistently on any platform without modifying the host environment. With few exceptions, a container can be deployed practically anywhere.  

Containerisation, backed by cloud agnostic container orchestration technologies, is your best bet for avoiding vendor lock-in. Open source technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes are popularly used together for the best possible results.  

Container Orchestration  

Container orchestration is the automation of a large portion of the operational work necessary to run containerized workloads and services. It encompasses a wide range of tasks required by software teams to manage the lifetime of a container, such as provisioning, deployment, scaling (up and down), networking, load balancing, and more.  

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 

The most straightforward approach is to run your containerized workloads on a cloud-independent container orchestration platform. Many platforms are available for cloud orchestration, such as Docker Swarm and Hashicorp Nomad, with Kubernetes being the most popular.  

With the main purpose of being cloud agnostic, the primary challenge is to meet the vendor-specific requirements for your applications. Various third-party technologies come into play here to help you define the Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Hashicorp Terraform, Cloud Foundry BOSH, and Red Hat Ansible are some of the technologies that can assist you with this process.  

Is Cloud Agnosticism Right for Your Business? 

The multi-cloud environment is too good of a perk to refuse. Avoiding vendor lock-in, negotiating price leverage, and best-of-breed capabilities, the opportunity to mix, match, and combine the best possibilities is a reality. Although this approach is complex to implement–with the right strategy and concrete choices–a multi-cloud strategy could be a critical point of transformation for your company. 

At GoDgtl, we work with organizations to rethink their business models and practices and help in implementing advanced technology systems and services to achieve digital transformation goals and support their business goals. 

Get in touch with us to learn more about our capabilities.