Why the need to go Multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud is an approach of using services from two or more cloud service providers – Enabling organizations to leverage multiple public clouds in combination with private cloud deployments and traditional on-premise infrastructure. More and more organizations are adopting the multi-cloud strategy as it helps them achieve the right blend of costs, compliances and functionalities – all while ensuring that they always have the choice to switch providers without affecting their deliverability. While adopting the multi-cloud approach will have its advantages, it also has a few challenges that need to be addressed:

• Security: Ensuring application security throughout all the cloud providers
• Monitoring: Monitoring the entire application as a whole instead of relying on specific services provided by the cloud service provider. These services are locked on to their own provider and fail to monitor the rest of the application.
• Managing complexity: With increased functionality and flexibility comes increased complexity in the form of integration between all the different services used in the multi cloud

How to ease the process of Multi-Cloud adoption?

What happens when we start thinking about the same data across multiple cloud providers? Organizations would need to take on the role of coordinating data availability and security across multiple cloud providers. It becomes imperative that you look at a platform solution which can help ease your process and iron out the challenges.
Let’s take the NGINX Application Delivery Platform for starters. It is perfectly suited for handling these challenges and offer great features. The beauty of NGINX being a cloud‑agnostic solution further helps by enabling easy integration with on‑prem and cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. At the time of writing this article, the NGINX container image is one of the most liked images in Docker Hub, with over 10k+ stars as opposed to the other webserver images that have around 3K stars.
NGINX is also the most widely used Ingress controller for Kubernetes. Now, organizations can also bring their own NGINX licenses (BYOL) to their chosen cloud service provider, or purchase it from the cloud service provider marketplaces.
The main advantage that the NGINX platform offers is its varied suite of tools which can take over many roles in a multi-cloud approach. This considerably decreases complexity in our architecture as we don’t have to worry about different standalone tools for functionality.

• 1) NGINX Plus with NGINX App Protect
  NGINX Plus is the only all-in-one load balancer, reverse proxy, and API gateway with WAF. It can be operated standalone or integrated with public cloud services to enable high‑performance app delivery while protecting apps from a range of threats including the OWASP Top 10 and beyond.
• 2) NGINX Ingress Controller with NGINX App Protect
  NGINX Ingress Controller is the best-in-class traffic management solution for containerized, cloud‑native environments. NGINX App Protect is embedded in NGINX Ingress Controller, moving WAF protection closer to apps and eliminating the need for a separate WAF device.
• 3) NGINX Controller
  Nginx Controller adeptly tackles the monitoring challenge faced by multi cloud architectures because it helps us maintain visibility and control of all our NGINX Plus instances across both cloud and on-prem environments. The Controller App Security add‑on enables SecOps to protect apps and APIs across multiple clouds.

In addition to the above-mentioned tools, NGINX helps us bridge the divide between SecOps and DevOps by offering CI/CD-friendly tools and self-service app management. NGINX solutions can be incorporated into DevOps workflows using APIs and are compatible with popular tools including Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. DevOps can rapidly deploy load balancers, DNS, and security while allowing NetOps and SecOps to retain control over enterprise‑wide networking and security for business‑critical apps.

Microservices and Multi-Cloud

With the advent of microservices, a Multi-cloud approach often includes a microservice driven cloud native architecture, selecting the best services from various cloud service providers. Microservices are important in this setting since they can be deployed across any cloud service provider without any need to retrofit code. However, the challenge that arises from this API driven architecture is ensuring a way that these services can communicate with each other in a secure and efficient manner.
NGINX Controller is the all-in-one solution for such scenarios as it has the ability to centrally manage all APIs, handle large volumes of API calls and offers specialised features such as rate limiting and real time monitoring- along with ensuring security.

In today’s volatile cloud marketplace most organizations are hedging their bets by depending on the multi-cloud architecture to ensure freedom of choice, get the best pricing and to meet compliance norms set from within. NGINX Application Delivery Platform is perfectly placed to help organizations get a head start at their multi-cloud architecture journey, while reducing costs and complexities.
Our team at Ashnik would be happy to help you implement NGINX based solutions and services to ensure your multi-cloud journey is smooth and efficient, write to us at success@ashnik.com
Survey Sources:
* A multi-cloud management survey by IDC
** Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report