Multi-cloud networking is the practice of connecting services distributed across public, private, and hybrid-cloud environments. It involves building and deploying a networking pattern that seamlessly spans global regions — increasing performance, flexibility, and reliability. Additionally, these networks are often centrally managed (boosting observability everywhere) while offering traffic management and security features needed for regulatory compliance.
Multi-cloud networking is crucial as organizations spread hundreds of workloads across clouds. Given the popularity of microservices and AI/LLM services, securing high-performance computing through various cloud providers enables services to readily exchange data and scale effectively. This is generally true for both externally distributed consumer applications and internal business services that support employees worldwide.
The concept of multi-cloud networking has existed, roughly, since the mid-to-late 2010s. The rise of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud (among others) has given teams multiple networking options — in terms of cost, regional availability, and capabilities.
How does multi-cloud networking work?
For the vast majority of organizations, hosting isolated applications on specific clouds simply isn't enough. Microservices architectures (to name one example) might be decoupled during development, many services comprising an application must communicate to enable features and other experiences. Quite often, these services — databases included — are spread across clouds for various reasons:
Cloud Platform A might be cheaper than Cloud Platform B.
One cloud provider might offer unique services that better serve a specific use case, especially when bleeding-edge technologies are involved.
It could be easier (or lead to less waste) to reserve computing resources on one platform vs. another — better fitting an organization's traffic profile.
Certain cloud providers might offer better flexibility, allowing teams to build on their terms.
Certain cloud providers might offer better performance and reliability.
Whatever the case, multi-cloud networking bridges the gap between distributed services. It helps organizations innovate more rapidly while connecting legacy applications to modern services. Sometimes, the app infrastructure comes first — where distributed apps already exist. Other times, multi-cloud networking means starting from scratch and planning your deployment model more proactively.
A unified network lets teams take advantage of each cloud platform's unique capabilities, while also maintaining operational consistency. Teams can apply the same general routing, security, and observability principles everywhere to make life easier. These outcomes are also possible in complex Kubernetes environments, where ingress and egress needs drive connectivity demands.
Key components of a multi-cloud network
Teams can make multi-cloud networking easier by implementing solutions such as reverse proxies, load balancers, and other centralized gateways to handle traffic routing automatically. This applies to north-south traffic entering and leaving the company network, plus east-west traffic flowing internally between business units.
Additionally, traditional networking components remain important across clouds — such as routers, switches, and access points. Tried-and-true virtual components like firewalls, NAT, VLAN, and VPNs also play important roles in enabling communication everywhere.
Then you have infrastructure elements that every organization needs at scale, such as service discovery, end-to-end traffic observability, and strong security. Teams must understand which services are active, where they're hosted, and continuously keep a catalog of services that automatically updates across environments. They need to understand traffic flows and spot suspicious client activity. And when hackers do strike, security measures must act quickly according to consistent response policies. These features allow organizations to keep track of stored and transmitted data while meeting compliance requirements.
Multi-cloud vs. hybrid-cloud networking
Despite a difference in naming, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud networking aren't mutually exclusive. For example, a network can exist that spans multiple clouds (say from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) and also enables communication with services hosted on-premises. The challenge comes from navigating privacy and security concerns with exchanging sensitive data without just separating each service into its own sort of "sandbox."
That said, multi-cloud doesn't have to involve on-prem infrastructure. It's fully possible to solely facilitate networking between distributed services. Not every company needs an on-premises datacenter, nor is the funding always available. In these instances, managed and cost-efficient cloud solutions are quite beneficial while also helping teams avoid expensive vendor lock-in.
Common multi-cloud networking best practices
There are a number of recommendations that can simplify your multi-cloud setup while helping you extract the most from it. Here are some highlights:
Consider creating your own cloud-agnostic networking setup that works across cloud providers, as opposed to creating new networking patterns for each provider. Avoiding cloud-native networking implementations can decrease complexity at scale while boosting flexibility.
Teams should consider using both public and private clouds to maximize flexibility, boost workload efficiency (as some platforms are best suited to certain use cases), and optimize costs.
Continually test your network(s) under dynamic load and other expected traffic conditions to minimize downtime later on.
Gain an in-depth understanding of common traffic patterns — including peak periods — to make more targeted routing decisions, spot troublesome behavior, and identify the most efficient networking pathways between distributed services.
Implement strong multi-layered security measures to form a comprehensive defense against common, emerging, and zero-day threats.
Build your network and observability suite for scalability and resilience, through failover protection and other automated remediation measures to keep services (and users) online.
Consider whether it makes sense to adopt formal software-defined networking (SDN) approaches and centralization to reduce management complexity.
This isn't an exhaustive list of guidelines. However, forming a functional multi-cloud networking strategy takes careful planning. It means evaluating business objectives, such as connecting isolated business units within the organization, while supporting them as seamlessly as technically and fiscally possible.
What are some multi-cloud networking challenges?
Implementing multi-cloud networking can be tricky. Each cloud provider maintains its own preferred networking patterns, architectures, and logic. Unfortunately, this often forces teams to reinvent the wheel of connectivity while determining routing, security, and more for their services.
An agnostic networking strategy (supported by supplemental networking components) can greatly streamline the process of connecting apps, services, and databases across clouds and availability zones. Some organizations achieve multi-cloud networking through solutions such as SD-WAN. This makes it easier to centrally define networking patterns across a variety of hardware and virtual components we touched on earlier.
What are the benefits of multi-cloud networking?
A seamless multi-cloud networking approach can bring the following benefits:
It enables teams to spread workloads across the environments best suited for them, boosting performance and usability.
By adding deployment flexibility, teams can pick and choose their cloud services to help optimize costs.
Centralization makes the entire network easier to manage at scale — even as networking components, connected devices, and users come and go.
Multi-cloud networking introduces management, security, and routing automations that reduce the need for human intervention (especially during outages or similar events).
Teams don't have to create a new connectivity pattern for every cloud provider they use.
Teams aren't locked into a certain ecosystem or cloud provider.
Business units across global organizations can theoretically communicate and share data amongst themselves much more readily.
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Does HAProxy support multi-cloud networking?
Yes! HAProxy One — the world's fastest application delivery and security platform — is designed to run anywhere. Deploy HAProxy Enterprise load balancer (the data plane) in front of any cloud-hosted service or application in minutes without reinventing networking patterns for each cloud. HAProxy Fusion (the control plane) provides full-lifecycle management, monitoring, and automation of multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team HAProxy Enterprise deployments.
Request a demo of HAProxy One to see how it simplifies networking across your cloud environments.