How multi-cloud networking can ensure reliability | TechTarget

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Most organizations now operate in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. When cloud migration first emerged, organizations would often network their cloud resources in a hub-and-spoke style, connecting their on-premises environments from data center hubs to each cloud separately. All cloud traffic had to access resources from another cloud that ran through the data center hubs.

For many organizations, however, using multiple clouds and interconnecting them has evolved to the point where the typical hub-and-spoke approach is no longer practical. Networks must now be able to interconnect between on-premises services and external cloud resources from multiple providers. The need to interconnect resources across multiple clouds and data centers has given way to multi-cloud networking services.

The need to provide reliable, secure network connectivity across a hybrid multi-cloud introduces multiple challenges, including complexity, fragility and inconsistency. Multi-cloud networking services aim to address these challenges.

Each cloud environment's network stack differs from each other and on-premises networks. These differences increase the difficulty of implementing reliable and secure connectivity.

The complexity of implementing distinct networking services in each environment also makes it easy to create fragile networks. A network problem in a multi-cloud environment could cascade network failures across the entire stack. Even a small error in a network service or virtual appliance configuration can lead to a failure in a fragile multi-cloud network.

The complexity of implementing networks in each environment separately also creates ample opportunities for inconsistencies in network or security functions. Inconsistent functions across clouds can lead to poor performance and unexpected behaviors, such as failed bandwidth optimizations or increased costs. Inconsistent configurations can also lead to gaps and errors in network security policy implementations, which could expose the enterprise network to risks.

Multi-cloud networking services strive to simplify the work of interconnecting workloads across environments, primarily by providing consistency on the consumption side and resilience in implementation.

Multi-cloud networking services, whether deployed by an enterprise or delivered as a service, aim to do several things:

Many reliability problems in multi-cloud networks stem from incorrectly configured network services. However, multi-cloud networking services and tools add redundancy to improve network availability, traffic management and scalability. By adding redundancy to a multi-cloud environment, multi-cloud networking tools enhance consistency and improve abstraction to reduce complexity and simplify management.

Most reliability issues in multi-cloud environments are rooted in lower-level connectivity problems, such as link failures or congestion. Multi-cloud networking services offer ways to deploy redundant connectivity to address these problems, or they build that redundancy within the infrastructure.

Multi-cloud networking services, such as software-defined WAN platforms, use transparent failover and recovery across multiple underlay network links to hide any individual link's failure from workloads and end users. A multi-cloud networking service can also hide the complexity of implementing multilink connectivity with failover and recovery from network engineers. This reduces the chance of mistakes and further boosts reliability.

Multi-cloud networking tools support load balancing and traffic management in the same way as network availability. Some tools can enable quality of service (QoS) management by prioritizing network traffic by class. Tools that manage network QoS can ensure applications that need specific network performance guarantees, such as high-end telepresence, can more reliably meet those needs.

Another aspect of network reliability is the ability to deliver the required level of network performance in the face of rapidly increasing demand. Multi-cloud networking services can make it easier for multi-cloud environments to meet spiking demands.

A multi-cloud network tool can address network traffic spikes by managing bandwidth to shift capacity away from lower-priority workloads. It can also simplify and enable network staff to add network capacity to the enterprise's resource pool transparently, which enables the environment to meet new network demands without additional work for administrators.

Multi-cloud network services, whether owned and operated by an enterprise or consumed as a service, help make a modern enterprise's hybrid multi-cloud network more reliable and performant. A multi-cloud networking platform should deliver those benefits while reducing the load on network engineers -- as well as application developers and cloud administrators -- by creating a consistent way to provision, secure and manage the network across all cloud environments.

John Burke is CTO and a research analyst at Nemertes Research. Burke joined Nemertes in 2005 with nearly two decades of technology experience. He has worked at all levels of IT, including as an end-user support specialist, programmer, system administrator, database specialist, network administrator, network architect and systems architect.