As the use of cloud technology has expanded over the past several years, so has the number of vendors. This trend has provided us with a wide variety of services and providers.
Some of these providers offer specialized services or focus on a geographic region to differentiate themselves from their competition. This is one reason organizations might adopt a multi-cloud approach.
Another reason for considering a multi-cloud environment is improved security and reliability. Software architecture has become more compartmentalized to enhance these features. Distributing functionality across various service providers and locations creates firewalls to minimize an outage’s blast radius.
Architectural redundancy enables running related services on different cloud platforms. Where information technology (IT) platforms once integrated multi-cloud functionality for its cost benefits, location specificity, and service differentiation, they now do so to maintain service strength and security.
Historically, IT has attempted to standardize and simplify architectures. Properly structuring a single set of software provides an easily observable and manageable infrastructure. The cloud has alleviated much of the infrastructure management component from internal IT. More often, it is now the cloud vendor’s responsibility. Similarly, the trends of software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) have eliminated the capital cost of acquisition.
With these advantages, the question remains, “How cost-effective is multi-cloud?” To accurately answer this question, we need to assemble and analyze costs from various sources.
Multi-Cloud Advantages
Organizations cite a few common reasons for using multi-cloud architectures. These reasons include differentiated service offerings, cost, and redundancy.
Different cloud services may offer different types of services. Some may support specific applications. Some support the Internet of things (IoT) and edge computing, while others may be more robust in their DevOps and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) support.
In some cases, organizations closely control the available cloud service choices. In others, developers and teams are free to architect their multi-cloud environments. These teams can choose the cloud offerings with services that best support their goals.
Taking advantage of the best-matched vendors provides performance advantages. Yet, it can result in a wide variety of vendor costs. Organizations must integrate and analyze all vendor costs to gain a picture of cost-effectiveness.
Cost is probably the most cited reason for multi-cloud adoption. Cloud providers price services in different ways. An organization may find it most cost effective to run specific applications on platforms with fewer capabilities. Services may also vary by geographic availability, so organizations must sometimes select a vendor due to a lack of options.
Redundancy is a principal factor for mission-critical applications. Multi-cloud environments can provide this redundancy. Organizations can engineer services to run on multiple providers, remaining online even if one or more providers experience an outage.
A multi-cloud environment offers organizations a variety of advantages. In fact, for geographically dispersed operations, it may be necessary to select multiple providers to maintain operations.
Because there are numerous factors for selecting providers, there are likely to be competing priorities. For example, choosing the best provider for a DevOps environment might incur high cloud costs. On the other hand, the efficiency gained in personnel costs and productivity may more than offset these costs.
To determine cost-effectiveness, we must obtain and analyze various costs across vendors and situations.
Understanding Cost in a Multi-Cloud Environment
Cost allocation is essential to any cloud implementation. Without it, there is no accountability for cloud spending.
Volume discounts and shared containers make cost allocation challenging even in a single cloud environment. Each cloud environment has unique tools for optimizing and allocating costs. The problem is that each provider requires you to use their methods to tag resources and allocate costs. To gain a complete picture, you need to integrate the results.
The solution to truly understanding whether your organization is saving or losing money from a multi-cloud strategy is an effective cost allocation and management tool. Yotascale provides you with a single solution for cost optimization and allocation across your multi-cloud environment.
Tagging resources is the first step in cost allocation. Tagging enables you to associate each resource’s cost to an organizational entity. Companies generally want this allocation to mirror their organization’s financial structure. It can also monitor costs of research and development activities for tax purposes or allocate application use to a specific customer.
To maximize effectiveness, we need to create rich, cross-platform multi-cloud tagging of resources. Standardized tagging provides a single lens through which to view all resource use. Additionally, it eliminates the need to normalize tags to integrate cost allocation from each environment.
Maintaining accurate tagging can be onerous across platforms. You must monitor the tags to prevent duplication and errors. Assigning duplicate tags to multiple resources results in a host of reconciliation challenges. In addition, tags must respect cost allocation rules for the appropriate organizational hierarchy. So, manually assigning tags consistently across multiple platforms is labor intensive.
A multi-cloud tool like Yotascale solves this challenge by automating tagging rules across platforms. It assigns unique tags and automatically corrects missing and duplicate tags. It also enforces rules to normalize tags across a multi-cloud environment.
With Yotascale, a single set of tags enables you to analyze costs across platforms and view usage through just one analytics portal. These views provide you with the in-depth knowledge you need to obtain volume discounts and negotiate contracts.
The provided analytics can also enable you to see where you may have reserved volume from one vendor while paying spot pricing for another. This insight can help you shift activities and save money with both providers. The key is that understanding your costs enables you to make cost-effective decisions.
Anomalies are also costly. Yotascale provides real-time cost monitoring across all your platforms. If Kubernetes uses a surprising number of resources, Yotascale can trigger and send alerts to the responsible parties to correct the problem in minutes rather than weeks.
Yotascale uses artificial intelligence (AI) tuning to provide recommendations. For example, if you reject a recommendation, the AI can tune similar recommendations to be more accurate in the future, thus limiting false positives. Yotascale also provides advice to optimize resource use across platforms.
Next Steps
Multi-cloud environments offer many advantages. Some providers may have specialized services — such as edge computing or DevOps — that are suited more to one application than another. Others may provide cost or geographic availability advantages. Using multiple providers also enables operational redundancy.
However, optimizing costs across a multi-cloud environment can be challenging and labor intensive because of disparate toolsets and analytics. Difficulties managing volume commitments and optimizing use cause additional labor and excess costs.
Yotascale’s multi-cloud platform helps manage your cloud environments through a single interface using automation, AI, and real-time analytics to optimize your costs. To find out more, visit Yotascale and sign up for a demo.
If you’re interested in developing expert technical content that performs, let’s have a conversation today.
