emma’s Guide to Mastering the Art of Multi-cloud DevOps

Multi-cloud can be the Swiss Army knife of sorts for DevOps — it adds versatility and adaptability to the established DevOps practices and methodologies. Most importantly, it restores the power of choice, allowing DevOps to strategically pick and choose from various cloud providers based on the unique requirements of each application and its various components through all development phases.?

With multi-cloud DevOps, you may pick the most cost-effective cloud platform for development and move to another one for its robust testing tools during testing. For production, you can choose yet another cloud for its best-of-breed security features and global network infrastructure.

Certainly no “cloud”walk, successful multi-cloud DevOps demands one crucial factor — consistency! Application deployments, configurations, and behaviors must be consistent across diverse cloud environments. But variations in infrastructure setups, resource configurations, or dependencies can lead to scenarios where an application behaves differently on one cloud environment compared to another. It can be hard but oh-so-rewarding once you nail it. Below, we share our recommendations for building a robust multi-cloud-based DevOps pipeline for achieving uniform performance, security, and functionality across any environment.

Best Practices for Multi-cloud DevOps

1. Use a cloud-agnostic CI/CD toolchain

Vendor provided toolchains like AWS CodePipeline are often tightly coupled with their underlying platforms. The goal is to make it difficult to migrate or add other clouds to the mix. Instead, utilize tools compatible with different platforms from the get go. It will allow consistent deployment pipelines across any underlying cloud infrastructure you may choose down the line.

As an example, a cloud-agnostic toolchain could comprise Git for code commit, Jenkins for build automation, Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, and JUnit for test automation. These tools support integrations with multiple cloud providers, promoting adaptability and mitigating the risk of deployment inconsistencies or lack of support when transitioning or communicating across various cloud environments.

2. Embrace standardization through abstractions

Abstractions allow DevOps to define standardized interfaces and templates that provide a consistent and simplified way to interact with resources across different cloud providers. This can be done through practices such as virtualization, containerization, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which abstract the underlying complexities of diverse cloud infrastructures at various levels. Standardization comes handy when different applications and application components deployed in different clouds need to communicate. The key is to adopt a platform-agnostic approach which involves choosing standardized containerization platforms like Docker and Kubernetes and IaC tools like Terraform and Ansible.?

3. Emphasize automation for consistency

Automation lies at the heart of DevOps. Automate tasks like provisioning, configuration, testing, and deployment to avoid errors and inconsistencies that inevitably occur with manual intervention. Through automation, repetitive tasks like scaling infrastructure, deploying updates, and managing configurations become manageable across all cloud environments. It not only ensures consistency in application delivery but also creates a foundation for a more reliable and seamlessly scalable multi-cloud DevOps environment.?

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