Accelerated cloud adoption has been helping enterprise customers resolve a lot of platform-related challenges. Yet, with the cloud platform adoption attaining its peak in the last few years, there has been a growing concern around building and maintaining a robust platform that can be utilized in all cloud-based solutions.

Due to the wide range of PaaS services spread across multi-cloud providers, this concern has grown multifold. Also with Kubernetes becoming the de facto standard for all platform deployments, engineers must have an implementation and operations knowledge around containers.

Businesses need service providers who can solve their platform implementation problems and be a part of their journey in platform stabilization and operations.

However, before we dig deeper into the various platform-related concerns, we need to understand the need for multi-cloud adoption and the issues that may be encountered while onboarding the platform to multi-cloud.

Multi-cloud: The Backbone of Enterprise Digitalization

Multi-cloud adoption is a rapidly growing trend in the enterprise digitalization journey. Organizations are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy due to various factors including:

• Eliminating dependency on a single hyperscaler, at large
• Gaining better negotiation powers by adopting cloud-agnostic development approaches (which provides freedom to deploy on any cloud)
• Mitigating the risk of large catastrophic failure (which occasionally happens, impacting large revenue generating applications)
• Freedom to pick and choose services from multiple providers, based on their comparative performance without worrying about a lock-in
• Mergers and acquisitions, where organizations are following a single cloud provider strategy, translating to the additional costs of migration for applications and services

Due to an increased platform adoption and speed of digitalzation, organizations need a service provider to manage their multi-cloud platform. These service providers should be capable of not just managing cloud infrastructure and platform provisioning, but also lending continued support to development teams during application onboarding.

Further, service providers can help increase platform stability as well. Application onboarding involves fine-tuning of many services, policies, configurations and rules. Also, it becomes necessary to onboard certain third party or open-source tools (such as those from CNCF- Cloud Native Computing Foundation) to help increase the reliability of provisioned cloud platform.

Usually, organizations have multiple infrastructure environments with focus on user acceptance testing and production environments where similar support is required to keep consistency, reliability and resiliency throughout. Hence, a constant support is required to keep the cloud platform reliable throughout its life cycle.

Challenges In Multi-Cloud Platform

Typically, any platform life cycle is defined in three phases.

Design and build

The architecture, design and implementation phase of the cloud platform which requires PRE/SRE and architects’ support. This requires workshops with customers to design and develop an automated cloud platform provisioning, based on an approved architecture and triggered via devops pipeline.

Onboard and Stabilize

This phase involves application onboarding post the design phase, along with cloud platform hardening with respect to security, networking and monitoring.  This requires onboarding of CNCF and other platform hardening tools that should be a part of the automation solution.

Operate and Improve

Typically, platform and application operations are core activities required after application onboarding. This phase requires platform readiness like observability and alert setup and its integration with ITSM tools for operations, incident tracking and collaboration with other teams.                

While the initial phase of multi-cloud adoption is easy, it becomes complex when application development teams incorporate new services. Issues, such as platform hardening and security related to these new services, become a concern. This creates more issues in operations.

With the right implementation of automation strategy around build activities, we can manage the adoption of new services. But setting up observability and utilizing the same automation framework during platform build for all production and non-production environments becomes equally important.

This scaled up scenario becomes challenging once the support team is expected to manage cloud services from multiple service providers. Each hyperscaler has its own native solutions for automation and observability, with different ways of enforcing various rules and policies on services.

Additionally, with new applications being onboarded, support for operations is required for both the application as well as the platform. This necessitates the operation readiness of the platform (and the framework). And requires tasks such as monitoring, alerting and integration to be configured as per the best practices and in an automated manner, before the BAU (Business as Usual) activities can begin.

The need of the hour is to manage all platform build requests in a consistent manner through a centralized automation framework. Additionally, with the onboarding of new applications, you need the support for operations for both the application as well as the platform.

How MC-Square Can Help Enterprises in Their Multi-Cloud Adoption

To eliminate the above mentioned issues, we introduced the OneClick platform launcher for provisioning and configuring infrastructure and platform. Leveraging OneClick, organizations can continuously improve both their production and non-production environments, allowing SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) and managers to focus on business outcomes rather than BAU tasks. 

It also enables teams to automate the control of their cloud platforms throughout their life cycles, encompassing the design, build, migrate and run strategies.

MC-Square (Multi Cloud Accelerator by CARE) is an amalgamation of our well-established reliability framework CARE (Cloud Application Reliability Engineering) and the power of DevOps (via OneClick) that addresses multi-cloud adoption problems. This solution is suitable for both green- and brown-field implementations and adds value by enabling BAU teams for implementing SRE practices.

MC-Square not only provides true DevOps-based automation capabilities to leading public cloud providers but also extends its wings to cover unmanaged platforms such as Rancher and Openshift.

The cloud solution focuses on platform solutions, covering Kubernetes and other commonly used cloud PaaS services from hyperscalers. It helps you apply the principles of software engineering to operations when combined with our CARE offering.

MC-Square also brings together all the best practices for achieving platform reliability and resilience. This is attained by utilizing reliability indexing features, continuous benchmarking, periodic validation and regular drills to improve system stability.

Conclusion

Businesses today are looking for solution partners that can help them adopt multi-cloud models and utilize the power of DevOps to speed up their digitalization journeys. In recent project engagements, our customers emphasized the need for similar design and build experiences to be carried forward from application onboarding till operations. This need can only be addressed by providing a unified experience throughout the phases of the platform life cycle.

MC-Square is created as an accelerator to equip delivery teams with the required framework to address their business needs. This multi-cloud accelerator utilizes automation capabilities around design, build, scale and day-to-day operations through DevOps principles. It helps resolve various multi-cloud adoption concerns and the need for operations and management of large platforms. And applies the principles of software engineering to all the three phases of the platform lifecycle, providing business units the freedom to strike an optimal balance between scale of operation and speed of innovation.

To learn more how you can benefit from MC-Square, reach out to us at contact.hyc@hcl.com.