Many organizations and businesses use multiple clouds to meet growing and unique computing requirements.
A survey by IBM established that over 85% of companies were using multiple clouds in various combinations. The multi-cloud environment may include a combination of various public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Deploying the multi-cloud infrastructure provides the flexibility and ability to create a perfect combination of the best cloud services and avoid vendor lock-in. The strategy considers factors such as performance, capabilities, reliability, cost, risks, and ability to meet the organization’s goals.
For example, a business may deploy a combination of Google Cloud for artificial intelligence, AWS for advanced analytics, Microsoft Azure for office applications, and other clouds depending on needs and the provider’s strength.
While this strategy has benefits, organizations may encounter challenges managing the multi-cloud environment. These arise due to cloud providers using different technologies, tools, security controls, policies, and rules. However, organizations can overcome these using a suitable multi-cloud management platform (MCMP).
Best Multi-Cloud Management Platforms
The choice of a multi-cloud management platform will depend on many factors. To help you select the best solution that meets your unique needs, below is a list of the best cloud management platforms.
Cloudify
Cloudify is an open-source multi-cloud management platform offering automated resource provisioning and optimization. The Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) orchestration platform also provides cost-tracking features to help organizations control their cloud spending. It is an excellent platform that optimally adjusts resources to support varying workloads.
Key features
- Customize visibility into the structure and dependencies using a canvas-based visual editor.
- Define and easily deploy and scale resources and applications in a multi-cloud environment.
- Automatically deploy, manage, and scale cloud resources based on set policies and triggers.
- Speed up the development and testing of CI/CD production environments.
- Seamlessly integrate with Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and other platforms.
- Simplifies and streamlines the management and control of complex multi-cloud management tasks.
Cons
- The open-source platform lacks comprehensive and advanced features available in premium tools.
Terraform
Terraform is a powerful, infrastructure-as-code software that enables teams to provision, change, and manage resources effectively in a multi-cloud environment.
The tools can automatically provision resources or on-demand. Available in open-source, cloud-based, or enterprise versions, Terraform is suitable for all types and sizes of businesses.
Key features
- Enables teams to effectively compose infrastructure as code and provision resources regardless of the provider.
- Easily scale the infrastructure to meet the demand and support different teams’ needs. It provides a self-service IaC that seamlessly integrates with CI/CD/ Version Control System (VCS), IT Service Management software (ITSM), and other development and management tools.
- Effectively manage the cross-cloud dependencies.
- Simplify the management of large-scale multi-cloud environments.
- Use the same workflows to deploy infrastructure and applications across different cloud platforms consistently.
CloudBolt
CloudBolt is a scalable and integrated multi-cloud and hypervisor management platform that supports a wide range of technologies and environments. It enables organizations to streamline the management of the cloud environment and improve self-service and responsiveness while optimizing costs.
The platform utilizes a pluggable architecture that enables teams to add support for other technologies more quickly and efficiently.
Key features
- Effectively connect disparate technologies and services from different service providers. The platform enables you to integrate and manage different services from a centralized control interface.
- It enables you to easily manage multi-cloud and hypervisor environments. Additionally, you can integrate resource handles such as Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud, Hyper-V, vCenter, and others.
- Allows IT staff, including those with average technical skills, to use pre-defined blueprints and avoid misconfigurations, compliance issues, and errors.
- The extensibility and ability to connect a wide variety of technologies improve flexibility, customization, and operational efficiency.
- Seamlessly manage workloads across different cloud platforms.
Flexera
Flexera is a feature-rich MCMP that provides visibility, cost optimization, and resource management. The platform equips IT teams with the capability to streamline cloud governance practices, enforce policies, forecast, and optimize costs. It also helps organizations to comply with the respective industry and standard regulations.
Key features
- Allows teams to gain complete visibility of their multi-cloud resources, such as compute, network storage, and others, from a centralized location.
- Use an advanced orchestration engine to automatically manage and control cloud operations and resources in a multi-cloud environment.
- Use inbuilt and custom policies to automate operations, security compliance, and governance.
- Use reusable blueprints to create and organize services across different clouds.
- Automated custom governance policies to control operations, costs, security, and compliance
Drawbacks of Flexera
- Lacks adequate API documentation
- Hass some outdated features
- It uses RightScale language, which has a steep learning curve, is slightly slower than alternative Java-based platforms, and can be challenging to debug.
IBM Cloud Manager
IBM Cloud Manager is a powerful solution that enables organizations to configure, deploy, provision, and manage services in a multi-cloud environment efficiently. It allows you to securely monitor and control the environment.
The multi-cloud manager enables teams to define templates or single units that can manage all the components of an application.
Key features
- Gain full visibility into all your clusters regardless of their location, identify non-operational nodes in all the clusters, and see failed pods.
- Manage resources, applications, governance, and security in multiple clusters.
- Gain visibility and address policy violations and security risks in your clusters.
- Create the cluster inventory and filter them in terms of geographical regions, cloud providers, functions, health status of notes, applications, etc.
- Enhanced workload placement that allows teams to distribute their workloads across different clouds.
Snow Software
Snow Software is a unified multi-cloud management platform that provides complete visibility into your multiple-cloud environment. The cloud-native platform enables teams to continuously monitor their clouds and get actionable insights.
It combines features that enable teams to optimize IT resources, allocation, usage, security, cost, and efficiency. The easy-to-deploy and powerful management tool provides advanced resource management and automated service delivery.
Key features
- Gain visibility of your cloud environment and resource usage, hence allocate the correct resources based on requirements.
- Provides a fully automated cloud service delivery that enables teams to work faster and eliminates time-consuming, repetitive, and error-prone manual tasks.
- Comes with a Snore Commander feature to support seamless integration between the different technologies.
- The powerful dashboard enables teams to manage the infrastructure and gain visibility into different clouds, applications, workloads, and usage by different groups.
- Easy-to-use configuration wizard that enables you to set up and customize their environment.
- Monitor and manage the various software assets spread across different clouds.
Drawbacks
- Unstable reports generation process.
- Navigation challenges on the user interface may slow down tasks.
- Complex interface with a steep learning curve.
Nutanix
Nutanix is a secure and scalable multi-cloud management platform. The self-healing platform supports almost every type of workload in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. It also supports various workloads across hypervisors and containers, including those with different compute, network, and storage needs.
Key features
- Provides visibility into cloud resource consumption that helps organizations optimize costs, get alerts, and avoid overspending.
- Uses machine learning technology to automatically detect unusual usage patterns.
- Allows you to select different packages to meet specific geographic regions.
- Stable management platform with reliable support, advanced analytical features, great reporting, and alert capabilities.
- Allows you to monitor virtual machines and determine their efficiency, including identifying resource-constrained or overprovisioned or those using extensive resources during some instances.
Cons
- Lacks micro-management feature to monitor and manage modern microservices
- Needs to be more user-friendly
- Limited off-office hours support
- Needs APIs to integrate with existing in-house tools and different vendors.
Bunnyshell
Bunnyshell is an Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform with great developer tools. The platform, which comes with GitOps, enables teams to deploy standardized development environments.
Generally, Bunnyshell enables teams to launch short-lived reproducible development environments. Teams can develop and maintain the multi-cloud development environments locally while running them in the cloud remotely.
Key features
- Deploy production environments faster and preview them automatically.
- Quickly and easily create an on-demand testing environment and remove it after the tests to avoid paying for idle resources.
- Eases cloud server management tasks, installation of certificates, data backups and restores, configurations, security, and more.
- Enables users to deploy cloud-based applications faster.
- Supports developer self-service features, hence eliminating unnecessary time-consuming manual tasks and giving developers more time to focus on more important tasks, such as writing code.
Drawbacks
- Lacks advanced features.
- Sluggish dashboard.
- Lacks comprehensive developer documentation.
- Some workflows, such as installing WordPress, are not straightforward and can be confusing. Luckily, Support can guide you, but it would be good if the processes were easier, even for beginners.
Morpheus
Morpheus is a powerful cloud management platform that enables organizations to streamline their multi-cloud environments. It helps developers with the self-service provisioning of container and VM-based applications.
The management platform, with various third-party integrations, helps to unify and standardize tools and processes across multi-cloud environments. Morpheus offers full application lifecycle management, including provisioning, access control, monitoring, backup, and other functions.
Key features
- Helps organizations to manage their multi-cloud environments and improve the speed and efficiency of their app development practices
- Use cost analytics and automation to make changes.
- Provision cloud infrastructure and applications faster.
- Simplify and Improve cloud security and practices such as authentication, access control, policies, compliance with regulations, and more.
- Simple, flexible, and scalable platform that allows you to adjust resources and integrate with other solutions.
VMware
VMware cloud management platform is a comprehensive solution that combines a wide range of features to fully manage your multi-cloud environment. It provides a centralized location for managing public, private, and hybrid multi-cloud environments.
The platform offers a set of features and tools to monitor, optimize, secure, and manage applications, data, and workloads across multiple private, hybrid, and public clouds.
Key features
- Optimize performance, resource usage, cost network, and other issues based on the AI-powered engine.
- Ability to integrate with over 200 hardware and software services.
- Improve cloud security, configuration, and compliance. Provides real-time monitoring and visibility into potential cloud security risks and misconfiguration while providing alerts and automatic remedial incident response.
- Enables organizations to comply with HIPAA, ISO, PCI, DISA, and other regulatory standards.
- Gain insights into the infrastructure, operations, applications, and other services on your cloud infrastructure.
Scalr
Scarl is a Cloud Management Platform that provides admins with the ability to use single application configurations across different clouds. The robust cloud-agnostic platform enables teams to configure once and use the configuration across multiple clouds.
It allows teams to centralize the security and compliance policy administration to ensure consistency in all the clouds.
Key features
- A reliable enterprise-grade management platform helps organizations automatically deploy applications across multi-cloud environments.
- Streamline and automate the process of deploying and scaling the infrastructure, such as adding or removing instances or resources based on consumption metrics.
- Enables organizations to view and control costs from a central location.
- Manage public and private multi-cloud infrastructure from a single CLI, UI, and API.
- Deploy a common set of features and configurations across different clouds.
- Enables IT teams to create and enforce various security and compliance policies
Drawbacks
- It does not have inbuilt advanced monitoring features, but you can add third-party solutions.
- Scaling can be inconsistent at times and result in either under-provisioning or over-provisioning the infrastructure.
- Limited analytics and reporting capabilities.
- Lacks advanced monitoring features.
Centilytics
Centilytics is a powerful MCMP that provides valuable insights and visibility that enables organizations to manage and control cloud performance and costs.
The platform helps you to access highly available and fast network and storage, database, and other flexible and high-performance computing services.
Key features
- Compares the resources available from different public and private clouds, enabling organizations to choose the best resources such as compute, network, database, storage, and other services.
- The platform provides resource and service usage analytics, automated alerts, governance, reports, and cost management.
- Provides a single interface to manage infrastructure, apps, storage, databases, network, and other components.
- Seamlessly transfer workloads or resources from one private, public, or hybrid cloud to another.
- Gain visibility into the performance of storage, databases, networks, applications, virtual machines, and other assets.
Cons
- Provides a lot of data and may confuse some people when searching for specific information.
- Need to make it easy to navigate and understand the the dashboard.
Next, we will discuss the challenges in multi-cloud environments.
Challenges in Multi-Cloud Environments
Managing the multi-cloud environment can be challenging due to skills gasp, security issues, non-compliance, policies, and other factors that may negatively impact performance and resource utilization.
Also, organizations may combine different clouds with disparate capabilities, technologies, and controls – resulting in integration and compatibility issues.
Other key challenges include;
#1. Lack of Adequate Visibility
Due to the complexity of the multi-cloud environment, some organizations lack full visibility, and this may prevent teams from properly monitoring, optimizing, and securing their assets.
Traditionally, getting a holistic view of a cloud environment is challenging, and this is even more complex when there are multiple VMs, containers, instances, services, and resources spread across multiple servers from different providers and in different regions. Consequently, the organizations may end up paying for idle resources and exposing themselves to security and compliance issues.
#2. Cloud Overspending
Cloud deployment helps to save costs by eliminating the need to invest in an in-house data center. However, unless managed properly, the cost of maintaining a multi-cloud environment may be excessive, especially when an organization pays more for overprovisioning or idle resources.
Distributing, moving, and synchronizing data across different clouds can be complex and costly. Additionally, while uploading is inexpensive and sometimes free, the exit costs could be very high. Besides the data costs, managing and securing the assets in a multi-cloud environment is expensive and may require higher technical skills and tools.
#3. Security and Compliance Challenges
Most cloud computing environments use a shared security model. The provider takes care of the infrastructure security, while the customer is responsible for the security of their applications, access control, and data. However, the exact responsibilities may vary from one provider to the other and whether the service is self or fully vendor or third-party-managed.
Additionally, vendors may have different security models, and there is a high likelihood of security gaps that may increase vulnerabilities and the attack surface.
#4. Applications, Processes, and Data Governance Challenges
Data governance and proper access control become a challenge as the volumes increase. Usually, the multi-cloud environment has more applications and processes spread out across different clouds. Additionally, the data volume grows rapidly and spread across several locations, making it difficult to control and ensure proper and secure access.
While most providers have in-built access control mechanisms specific to their clouds, managing a multi-cloud environment is difficult unless there is a unified solution. Challenges include managing multiple access systems simultaneously and ensuring consistent policies in the environment.
What are Multi-Cloud Management Platforms?
MCMPs are software solutions for monitoring, managing, and controlling complex and dynamic multi-cloud environments. The platforms equip businesses with the ability to optimize resource utilization, application integration, and cloud costs while ensuring security and compliance.
Additionally, some solutions enable organizations to distribute their applications and workloads across different clouds. This helps to balance the loads and improve speed and response time while avoiding overloading a particular cloud.
As the multi-cloud environment expands, teams may be overwhelmed, resulting in inefficiencies, non-compliance, security issues, and problems. An ideal tool should provide adequate visibility and enable teams to optimize the environment for performance and better ROI.
Key Features to Look for in a Multi-Cloud Management Platform
An effective multi-cloud management platform provides a combination of features that ease the administration of the multi-cloud infrastructure. While the needs may vary from one organization to the other, below are some key features to look for.
✅ Automating the configuration, provisioning, monitoring, and other cloud resources management tasks
✅ Monitor and optimize the computing, storage, network, applications, and other cloud infrastructure components.
✅ Provide insights into cloud resource consumption patterns.
✅ Ability to manage various resources across multiple clouds from different providers.
✅ Provide compliance, security, policy, and governance audits
✅ Real-time threat and risk assessment and analysis
✅ Provide insights, self-service capabilities, consumption metrics, analytics, and cost management.
✅ Adequate security management features including but not limited to endpoint security, Identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and more.
✅ Flexibility and scalability to meet current and varying workloads and other needs.
✅ Support for target cloud providers: The tool should support all the cloud providers you intend to engage.
Conclusion
A multi-cloud environment offers a wide range of benefits, and organizations may use several deployment models to enhance security, flexibility, scalability, and other benefits. However, it requires proper management and controls to ensure reliability and maximum ROI.
Ideally, the Multi-cloud management platforms provide the tools that enable various IT teams to monitor and manage the multi-cloud environment and resources. The platforms offer administrative visibility that helps teams manage resources better, gain valuable insights, and optimize multi-cloud resources and spending.
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