As organizations and their teams begin to execute their 2022 plans, many companies are moving beyond simple cloud migration plans and evaluating multi-cloud solutions. Companies have begun to realize the business agility and technical benefits that cloud platforms provide, however they also realize that there are many trade-offs by moving enterprise solutions to the cloud. Both platform availability and costs have started to make organizations further evaluate how workloads are best moved to the cloud.
In December alone, leading cloud providers suffered 3 major outages causing service disruption for several consumer and enterprise solutions – including massive platforms like Slack and Disney+. These recent cloud outages are pushing organizations to validate that their cloud deployments will not become impacted by a single cloud provider outage. Additionally, they are evaluating cloud technologies used for their applications are supported on all cloud providers, not just one cloud provider. Many companies that were early cloud adopters leveraged serverless technologies that enabled teams to deliver applications in days or weeks, not months.
Companies quickly realized that there are a major trade-off for serverless architectures. Serverless architectures are primarily only supported in specific implementations for a single vendor. As companies began to operate serverless applications at scale, they quickly realized the high costs of running these apps. Since the serverless technology was vendor-specific, these organizations are now locked into a specific cloud platform.
The Future is Multi-Cloud
Companies are more aware of how to optimize their cloud deployments for security, availability and cost. The biggest hurdle for many organizations is making decisions around being able to quickly implement a solution on a single cloud platform with a proprietary framework or adopting a multi-cloud approach at the beginning.
A leading architecture for multi-cloud capabilities is through the process of containerizing applications and then deploying the application into a Kubernetes environment. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, management, and operation of containerized applications. It was first announced by Google in 2014, as a critical part of their infrastructure. Kubernetes is now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with implementations and versions of Kubernetes supported by various vendors and also currently available from all leading cloud providers.
In a recent survey by the CNCF, which was based on a survey of more than 19,000 developers from 155 countries in late 2020 and early 2021, the usage of Kubernetes increased 67% in 12 months. Kubernetes enables enterprises to rapidly deploy and orchestrate containerized applications, however, Kubernetes requires skilled resources to deploy and operate the environment and applications.
Ulap Enables Multi-Cloud Deployments
As covered in our previous blog, Ulap is a cloud native data platform that enables teams to deploy cloud-native infrastructure and applications via user guided wizards on the leading public cloud providers. At the center of the Ulap architecture is Kubernetes. The Ulap cluster deployment wizard guides users through a secure deployment of Kubernetes, that is optimized for their cloud platform and application requirements.
Teams that use Ulap can have a secure cluster up and running in less than 30 minutes without having to know DevOps, CloudOps, or vendor lock-in.
Once the cluster is online, teams can quickly deploy open-source or custom applications using the Ulap deployment engine. Using the same Ulap workspace, teams can deploy the same type of infrastructure and application to a different cloud provider. Again, this can all be completed without any dependency of DevOps or CloudOps resources!
Stay Tuned For Updates from the Ulap Team
Upcoming blogs will provide step-by-step tutorials for using Ulap to create a secure workspace for your team to deploy Kubernetes clusters and open-source applications and custom applications on your cloud of choice.
If you want to learn more about Ulap, please check out our website or register for a free 30-day trial.
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