Overcome Multi-Cloud Management Complexity

Let’s First Understand What is Multi-Cloud Management

Multi-cloud management involves managing cloud computing workloads or cloud service applications from multiple cloud vendors. A multi-cloud environment could be all-private or all-public or hybrid cloud which is a combination of both.

A multi-cloud strategy allows you to adopt different cloud services from different cloud vendors or providers, you can customize your infrastructure according to your business goals, you can take advantage of strengths of different cloud vendors, it gives you flexibility to optimize your cost and performance, provides ability to avoid vendor lock-in and minimize downtime and data loss.

Some of the common multi-cloud management challenges that you can encounter as an enterprise and how you can overcome.

A multi-cloud approach is ideal for most of the businesses but there are a few challenges to it as well.

• Security: There is a flipside of putting all your eggs into different baskets, it can make it harder to secure your data and prevent leakage, having said that there are security benefits to it as well as it provides greater protection against attacks.
• Underutilization of Multi-Cloud: Poor multi-cloud management becomes the key reason to bear unwanted expenses. Say, you’ve integrated multiple cloud services in your application, chances are, you may not utilize all the benefits of the cloud to their full capacity. This way, you end up paying for the services that are not even used.
• Cloud Sprawl: Cloud sprawl occurs when users fail to decommission non used cloud computing resources or services, the main reason being the workloads that frequently move between clouds. This makes it challenging to get resource visibility and brings in:
a. Increased operational complexity and cost
b. Lack of visibility related to the spend/cost
c. Risk of security breaches
d. Lapses in regulatory and internal policy compliance

• Managing Multi-Cloud: When an enterprise uses multiple public and private clouds, managing their multi-cloud setup brings in many complexities and challenges which the IT team and the business has to deal with.

  Multi-Cloud Management is one of the biggest challenges faced in the current times. Service providers (SPs), managed service providers (MSPs), and systems integrators (SIs) alike are pursuing an unprecedented opportunity created by the proliferation of cloud services. With Multi-Cloud Management Platform, Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs), Enterprises and Government Agencies, are all experiencing an explosive growth in the proliferation of cloud services by their users and customers. Cloud services includes software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or the proverbial anything-as-a-service (XaaS). In fact, for IaaS services we are now invariably looking at multi-cloud management services.

Key Multi-Cloud Management Platform Capabilities of Jamcracker

Some of the specific multi-cloud management platform capabilities are listed here:

• Jamcracker Platform's Application Stack designer helps organizations design, deploy and manage everything from VMs, applications, storage to databases as cloud-based solution stacks.
• It enables workload automation and provides the flexibility to automate the deployment of multi-cloud servers with the required business processes and applications instantaneously.
• You can create VMs or multi-cloud multi-tier Application Stacks using the Designer.
• You can track progress of the VMs and Application Stacks as they are being created. After launching, you can modify/resize the configuration details (Flavor, RAM and CPU) of the VMs.
• The platform allows you to add/attach new/existing storage volumes (Block Storage) to your VMs. You can create a volume snapshot at any time you want.
• You can configure networking i.e. which subnet of which VPC would you like to put the VM or Application Stack under. You can choose from multiple vNICs to configure the network interfaces to the VMs.
• The platform supports multiple Policies. You can choose from an event-based or scheduled based policy, say, for Monitoring the VMs.
• You could decide to monitor parameters such as CPU utilization, RAM utilization etc.
• Policies can be used to automate tasks and actions which might otherwise need user's intervention. You can monitor and apply policies to VMs, volumes, Application Stacks. For example, you can create a policy to resize the instance if your instance's CPU utilization is at the critical level 3 times in 60 seconds.
• The platform provides an easy-to-use UI to access all the VMs and Application Stacks you have created.
• You can also import existing VMs that you have created in your environment prior to implementing the Jamcracker Platform allowing you to view/manage the VMs from the Instances page
• The widget-based IaaS Dashboard provides you visibility to your organization's cloud (IaaS) resources. It allows you to view IaaS usage data using a variety of visualizations such as area graphs and bar charts.
• You can use the Budgeting module to define and allocate Budgets by creating budget codes. You can input your specific budget codes while creating resources (VMs, Application Stacks etc.).
• The system will validate and provide alerts if the cost of services you are purchasing is exceeding the allocated if the budget. You could also configure an approval workflow to require admin approval if budget is being exceeded.
• Jamcracker Platform provides a Content Management System (CMS) based store front allowing you to have a custom look/feel/layout for your portal. Any Drupal developer can make changes to the CMS based portal.
• Since the CMS store is based on Drupal, [35000 plug-ins] it inherently supports integration to social media, recommend store or service, rating of services or applications by users of the store etc.