Multi-cloud management is the process of managing services, workloads, and infrastructure components distributed across a mixture of cloud environments. Such management strategies recognize that each cloud vendor offers specialized solutions and features, with each supported by its own APIs, tools, data plane functions, and management control plane.
Teams want to create optimal data flows across networks to boost performance, reliability, and flexibility while reducing cloud costs. They want to know where their services live. They must also be confident that services hosted in different clouds can communicate with one another, ensuring that data can travel efficiently wherever needed. Avoiding vendor lock-in is another key tenet of multi-cloud management.
Conceptually, multi-cloud management has only existed for about a decade, emerging in response to the rise of new cloud computing platforms. As companies shifted towards multi-cloud and away from traditional on-prem deployments, they soon needed to reduce infrastructure fragmentation after distributing their applications.
How does multi-cloud management work?
Multi-cloud management starts with planning. It means understanding your services and their technical requirements, before choosing the cloud platform that offers the ideal balance between function and cost. For example, if you need a variety of vendor services and global scalability, AWS might be a good choice. If you need an enterprise-ready platform that works well alongside traditional, on-prem deployments, Azure might serve you best.
A sound multi-cloud management strategy ensures that applications, APIs, and AI services scattered across cloud environments are accounted for. They allow for quick, often automated scalability to handle fluctuating demand, provisioning either new load balancing clusters or cloud instances at will. This ensures that your workloads remain performant and reliable.
On-demand scalability is also made possible through simpler management of components such as virtual machines (VMs), databases and other storage, and networking solutions (SDN and SD-WAN) that help unify everything under one umbrella. Teams can also support key workloads by tailoring ongoing resource allocations (CPU and memory) to provide some much-needed headroom.
Finally, any effective multi-cloud management platform must be interoperable with different clouds. Integrations enable the central management suite to connect with vendor APIs, services, and individual features to simplify application delivery. In an ideal scenario, teams wouldn't have to reinvent their infrastructure and networking patterns to make this happen. The best management tools abstract away the burden of designing routing logic for each individual cloud through unification.
Easier multi-cloud management through centralization
Let's skip ahead and assume you've deployed all your applications within their respective clouds. You now have what feels like a tangled web of distributed services, which must be visible and globally aware to enable easier data transmission among themselves.
Centralized management is key to making this happen, giving teams access to all cloud resources, configurations, and metrics in one place. Whether through GUI or API (or both, interchangeably), teams can see the following:
A comprehensive list of their services, where they're hosted, and their health status
Per-app or global configurations and other settings
Traffic data including total requests per second (RPS), security responses, and performance indicators such as bandwidth consumption or added latency
Visibility into both north-south and east-west (internal) traffic
Global security policy management and individualized insight into how each security layer is working
Centralized control planes help you manage the entire lifecycle of each cloud workload. They give teams a single pane of glass that's easy to use, offer visually-rich dashboards, and promote improved regulatory compliance through auditing and policy management.
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Does HAProxy support multi-cloud management?
Yes! The HAProxy One application delivery platform gives you everything you need to simplify multi-cloud management.
With HAProxy One, your teams get consistent configuration, traffic visibility, and security policy enforcement across every cloud environment you operate in — without reinventing your infrastructure for each one. A single control plane gives everyone the same view of what's running, where it lives, and how it's performing.
Ready to see it in action? Request a HAProxy One demo.