When and how should your business use a Cloud Agnostic architecture?

Building a cloud strategy that meets your company’s unique needs is more complex than spinning up a few workloads in the cloud. Today’s sophisticated cloud deployments follow unique architectural approaches, like cloud agnostic strategies, to meet a variety of unique business and technical needs. As the cloud becomes a primary initiative for many of today’s application development requirements, it’s important to understand how cloud-agnostic strategies can deliver value and how this cloud architecture approach differs from other common strategies in today’s enterprise cloud initiatives. Let’s see,

• What is a cloud-agnostic architecture?
• Cloud-native architecture vs. cloud-agnostic architecture
• When should your business use a Cloud Agnostic approach? 
• How to build cloud-agnostic applications

What is a cloud-agnostic architecture?

A cloud-agnostic architecture strategy focuses on seamlessly creating applications that can run in any cloud environment. Cloud-independent applications and services do not rely on the limited toolchains of a single major cloud platform. These applications can be integrated with a completely customized mix of vendor-supplied and open-source tools. While there is some risk regarding tool compatibility and standardized application management, this approach liberates the organization from vendor lock-in.

Many organizations value the flexibility and freedom of a cloud-agnostic approach. This is why this approach has gained traction in many development strategies. On the other hand, developing a vendor-independent app or service requires more work to build and integrate all required features. However, this can be a time-consuming process for development teams.

Cloud-native architecture vs. cloud-agnostic architecture

While both architecture approaches achieve the same goal of hosting distributed applications in the cloud, the cloud-agnostic approach provides development teams with a significantly different experience than the cloud-native approach. While there are numerous comparison points to consider, there are six key areas where we must recognize the differences between cloud-native and cloud-agnostic application development and management.

Cost

Enterprise customers are typically charged by proprietary Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) centered on a combination of data storage and licensing requirements. This allows organizations to use a pay-as-you-go model rather than pay flat-rate subscription fees. Furthermore, CSPs such as AWS, Azure, and Oracle provide dedicated cloud cost management services. This is to assist organizations in controlling cloud spending.

On the other hand, organizations are on their own with the cloud-agnostic approach. Cloud-agnostic architectures provide more control over costs because they have greater access to open-source tools. However, organizations must carefully track spending to ensure that funds are not wasted on tools or platform services that the development team does not use. Furthermore, the organization is responsible for the cost of recovery from software failures, which can be substantial.

Scalability

When it comes to service and application scalability, cloud-agnostic architecture is arguably the better option. Because apps and services can move across cloud platforms in a cloud-agnostic architecture, they can quickly scale up to meet demand. This feature is especially useful when migrating on-premise architectures to the cloud. A cloud or platform-agnostic architecture makes the transition easier while keeping core business services on-premise. The best example would be open-source tools like Prometheus for event monitoring perform the same way regardless of which cloud platform is used.

Flexibility

Cloud-agnostic approaches typically provide more development flexibility than cloud-native approaches. With cloud-agnostic architectures, developers are not limited to the capabilities or tools of a single proprietary cloud platform. The cloud-agnostic architecture frequently incorporates open-source tools, libraries, and integrations that evolve regularly to reflect emerging development trends.

Support

Platforms for automation and DevOps, such as Jenkins and Gitlab, offer a viable level of support for independent, cloud-agnostic application builds. In the cloud-agnostic approach, developers can customize and integrate more functionalities independently with significant in-house expertise. Moreover, avoiding vendor lock-in ensures that businesses are not tied to a single operating platform and can move applications as they see fit.

Cloud-native applications, on the other hand, only have the proprietary platform’s built-in networking, security, and monitoring provisions. Other underlying architecture concerns may hinder large development efforts for the developers. 

Reliability

In the event of a failure, cloud-agnostic architectures can provide redundancy and good recovery speed in developing applications in any production environment. To further reduce downtime, you can move services to another platform while one platform is being maintained or experiencing a disruption.

Cloud-native strategies, on the other hand, are frequently associated with the risk of vendor lock-in. Businesses with cloud-native architecture may be left in the dust if a CSP decides to significantly raise their prices or discontinue their services.

When should your business use a Cloud Agnostic approach?

It’s not surprising that more businesses want to be cloud agnostic, especially in this post-pandemic era. Approximately 93 percent of businesses now use a multi-cloud strategy involving utilizing two or more public cloud solutions. This allows businesses to capitalize on differences in features or prices between providers.

Another reason why businesses want to adopt this strategy is to avoid vendor lock-in. Cloud computing has totally transformed the way businesses operate. It accomplishes this change by providing them access to more products and services without requiring them to support and maintain their hardware and infrastructure. However, this increased reliance on cloud computing raises the risk of dependency.

While it may appear impossible for Amazon or Google to go out of business, companies such as AOL demonstrate that cutting a vendor service is only partially implausible. Being cloud agnostic protects your company from vendor lock-in by making it more flexible and adaptable.

How to build cloud-agnostic applications

Companies can benefit from developing a cloud-agnostic solution by leveraging ready-made solutions, microservices, and design strategies. One of the foundational elements of any successful cloud-agnostic design is containerization. Containers are a form of operating system virtualization in which application code dependencies or other elements required to run the application is packaged to allow the app to run from anywhere.

Based on this, advanced solution providers enable businesses to run and manage multiple container clusters across multiple cloud environments. This is a critical component of any cloud-agnostic strategy. Furthermore, they combine the value of production-ready container images with the benefits of cloud-native backups. Thus, businesses can deploy and manage container images at scale while reducing vulnerabilities and exposures. These capabilities enable businesses to realize the value of a cloud-agnostic approach in a simple, streamlined manner.

Closing Thoughts

Suppose your company is willing to deal with the added complexity and upfront investment of developing a cloud-agnostic strategy. In that case, you will likely see benefits over a longer time horizon. You will be in a unique position to quickly mitigate the operational impact of any provider outage or security issue; simultaneously, provider-agnostic competitors lose valuable traffic and trust.

Your team can better serve provider-specific services, preceding long-term benefits in exchange for faster iteration and a shorter time-to-value cycle. If you have a smaller development team without a dedicated operations staff, you can still benefit from the lower operational overhead provided by managed services right away.

Finally, a balance of short- and long-term goals influences the decision to go cloud agnostic. Smaller teams would benefit from using managed services to get to the market as quickly as possible. Conversely, larger enterprises can use their considerable resources to create an agnostic design that will provide long-term benefits.