When businesses develop cloud applications, they typically start with one cloud for simplicity’s sake. However, almost all of them will end up doing some form of multicloud, for different reasons:
- They may want to ensure they’re getting the right mix of cloud services from different providers.
- They may want to take advantage of the experience their developers have with a particular cloud.
- They may even end up doing multicloud unintentionally by connecting with SaaS providers that are multicloud themselves.
Regardless of why a business adopts multicloud, the question then becomes how to do it better. Effective multicloud networking can help ensure your end users enjoy the high-quality experience you intended, and that your applications are able to scale without breaking as you add users.
Let’s examine four ways multicloud networking can help support better performance for your cloud applications.
1. Interconnect to clouds for better, more predictable performance
The default option for cloud connectivity is to simply drop traffic on the public internet, and leave it up to the cloud provider to determine what happens next. Your traffic will reach the cloud eventually, but it won’t always follow the most direct route to get there. Instead, it may cross multiple ISP networks, all while competing with other traffic for limited bandwidth.
This can result in additional network latency that degrades application performance. Perhaps even worse than poor performance alone, over-relying on the internet also leads to unpredictable performance. Not only might your applications experience high latency, but you won’t even know how high on any particular day.
Getting the best performance from your applications requires exercising greater control over your multicloud networking. This may require private routes to your most frequently accessed data hubs. This concept is known as interconnection. As part of your multicloud networking strategy, you can interconnect with multiple cloud providers in locations throughout the world to ensure the shortest, most direct routes possible for your traffic. This keeps latency low and allows you to provide a consistent user experience.
2. Access best-of-breed services seamlessly from different providers
Different cloud providers excel in different areas. For this reason alone, your user experience will suffer if you can’t get reliable, high-performance connectivity to all those different clouds. However, keep in mind that your needs will change over time, and that the best cloud providers for your situation will change accordingly.
For instance, cloud providers can increase their prices, and you wouldn’t want to be stuck overpaying just because it’s too difficult to leave. You also have to plan for potential cloud outages. In this case, the best cloud for the job will obviously be the one that’s up and running.
For all these reasons and more, you need to be able to switch between clouds seamlessly, without impacting performance or user experience. Doing this requires highly flexible multicloud networking. You need the ability to connect to your chosen cloud providers on demand—and the ability to easily update or replace those connections whenever your needs change.
To get this flexibility, access to a dense ecosystem of cloud providers is essential. Also, virtual interconnection services are helpful, as they’re much easier to change than physical network infrastructure that’s built for a particular purpose.
3. Connect workloads over the internet
I talked earlier about the dangers of using the internet as the default option for all cloud connectivity scenarios. However, this doesn’t mean you should avoid the internet altogether. Just as choosing multiple clouds can deliver better results for your applications, a mix of private and public connectivity can deliver better results for your multicloud networking.
Say you need to connect to users in a market where you don’t have a presence, and you have no desire to build a presence there. The internet is perfect for something like this; anywhere you want to connect, it’s already there. You just have to ensure you’re connecting the right way: in the right places and near the right partners.
Connecting over the internet is better at Equinix. In fact, more than 25 years ago, Equinix got its start by providing vendor-neutral data centers where network providers could meet and peer their traffic with one another. That neutrality allowed traffic to move seamlessly among different providers from around the world, and helped make the explosive growth of the internet possible.
After all these years, Equinix IBX® data centers are still the place where network providers come together to exchange traffic on a neutral platform. If you’re looking for low-latency connectivity over the internet, getting close to all those network providers in the Equinix ecosystem can help.
4. Enable hybrid multicloud networking
The final piece of the multicloud puzzle is to consider situations where it doesn’t make sense to use the cloud. For instance, you may want to keep sensitive, private data on-premises so that you can apply extra security measures. Or, you may do it to get better control over your compliance requirements. Some cloud services replicate data in many different locations worldwide. This is great for resiliency, but it also puts you at risk of regulatory penalties for storing sensitive data where you shouldn’t.
There are tradeoffs involved with running a multicloud architecture. Managing those tradeoffs requires keeping certain datasets on private infrastructure, but still making that data accessible and adjacent to the public cloud. A mix of public and private connectivity can help with that, but we also have to consider the security implications. If your application has traffic originating on the public internet, you need to ensure that traffic can flow freely to your chosen cloud providers—and only your chosen cloud providers.
Protecting your hybrid multicloud environment requires you to put a security boundary around your internet traffic, in the form of private IP routing and intrusion detection/prevention systems. Again, the internet can help with your multicloud networking strategy, but only if you optimize and control it for your purposes.
Learn more about optimized multicloud networking on Platform Equinix
Since both network and cloud providers gather at Equinix, our data centers can provide the bridge between the internet and your multicloud environment. Any workloads that you host at Equinix are only one hop away from a dense ecosystem of cloud and network providers. So, you can feel confident that your applications will provide optimal performance across both public and private networks.
To learn more about how to optimize multicloud networking, read the guide: 7 Key Questions to Ask when Architecting a Multicloud Network.
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