totally interchangeable cloud provider feature sets. Here the guiding principle
is that in order to reap the full benefits of cloud, being able to take advantage
of the best service and feature advances is of utmost importance.
A good best of breed approach involves selecting a primary cloud vendor. This
vendor is where the main center of gravity for cloud operations lives, with the
primary identity and security designs centralized around the main provider. It
is, of course, straightforward to utilize new services and features from the pri-
mary vendor, but the enterprise also explicitly leaves open the possibility of
reaching across to another cloud vendor for a specific service, capability or
feature that is either not available from the primary cloud vendor, or does not
meet requirements as well.
A reasonable question might be, doesn’t that add complexity? The answer is,
yes, it does. However, under the right circumstances, the benefit is worth the
complexity. In this model, there is an architecture assessment process that
explicitly considers the option of using a second (or third!) cloud provider, given
that the value for the use case justifies the extra effort. These types of scenar-
ios can include the following:
• Reaching out from the primary cloud provider to use an API-driven ser-
vice on the second provider. Because authentication can be handled at
the individual request level, an entire duplicate identity infrastructure on
the second cloud provider isn’t required.
• Utilizing a particular query-friendly data store in the second cloud pro-
vider, populated via messaging queues or object storage originating in
the first cloud provider. (This can be effective if egress data volumes
aren’t too high.)
• Machine learning training can be performed on a second cloud vendor,
especially if the source data is publicly available. Then the results can be
brought over to the primary cloud to build and deploy real-time scoring
applications.
While the above are only three examples, they illustrate how this model pro-
vides a balanced approach, avoids the lowest common denominator problem,
and provides access to the latest cloud innovations, all while keeping complex-
ity in check.
Of course, every enterprise is different, and there may be compelling reasons
and priorities in a specific case that indicate a different approach. There are
certainly architectures and options available other than those just discussed,
but this should provide a solid baseline to understanding how two major archi-
tectural approaches to cloud are being utilized by major enterprises. Maybe
yours can utilize them as well!
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