Is your enterprise organization taking advantage of a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy?

According to Gartner Group, over 75% of mid-size and large organizations will have adopted a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy by 2021. What’s most critical for your enterprise is how to turn that strategy into a bottom-line reality.

Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud: What’s the Difference?

At first glance hybrid cloud and multi-cloud may sound the same.

Multi-cloud is a solution for customers looking to work across more than one cloud provider to distribute its workload and data across multiple cloud storage technologies and infrastructure providers.

Hybrid cloud is a blending of two models: running some applications in the public cloud and running other applications on-premises or in a private cloud.

The Benefits of Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud Strategies

Companies often choose a multi-cloud path to gain resiliency and improve system stability.

Multi-cloud strategies let an organization distribute its technology capabilities and ensure applications perform better and are more available. With a multi-cloud approach, enterprises choose cloud providers in different regions to best meet their particular goals, such as balancing user load or reducing system fail-over.

Other benefits of a multi-cloud strategy include:

    • Performance Gains: With a multi-cloud plan, organizations optimize their use of data storage and processing in regions and zones with the closest proximity to applications and users. This is especially true as more global cloud providers are rolling out edge computing solutions. Improved proximity results in better performance and reduced latency.
    • Lower TCO: Flexible multi-cloud architectures allow the mix and matching of services between different IaaS providers to reduce the total cost of ownership, particularly with larger and more sophisticated applications. Having all systems within a lone cloud provider gives no ability to move a portion of the workload or system to another provider with better pricing for that need.
    • Reduced Risk: Additionally, multi-cloud flexibility companies gain a reduction of operational and financial risk that happens with a single provider. This is multiplied as an organization adds more and more technology solutions within a single IaaS provider.

The benefits of hybrid cloud strategies are similar.

By placing some applications and technologies in public clouds and some in a more managed environment, organizations gain flexibility, resilience and more control over costs. Common benefits of running technologies in public clouds include ease of deployment, scalability and automated management.

For example, customer-facing web applications and sales tools might be a perfect fit for a public cloud deployment. Whereas other applications – like mission-critical or financial systems – may run on-premises or in a private cloud for better privacy, data security and control. However, those differences are starting to blend more and more each year.

How Databases Factor into Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Cloud Strategies

With databases being central to supporting application design, development and capabilities, it’s important to understand the key aspects of DBMS systems that enable these strategies.

Here are some critical areas to consider:

    • Replication and Synchronization: Your data platform must be able to balance and distribute workloads across nodes and across clusters quickly and efficiently to fully support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. Automatic replication of nodes and clusters must be in place to meet the redundancy, fail-over and disaster recovery needs of your organization. Data updates and changes need to be reflected instantly across the ecosystem to deliver data integrity and resilience.
    • Isolation: In order to meet data privacy or sovereignty regulations within and across countries, a database needs to support storage and processing to be controlled and targeted to specific clusters and nodes. Not having this in place rapidly increases your risk in a deployment.
    • Localization: To deliver great customer experiences, a database architecture must support being able to store specific data in zones that are nearest to users and applications. This reduces network hops, improves latency and ensures the best performance.

Getting from Strategy to Real-World Solutions

How does the Couchbase platform make it easy for customers to benefit from multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies?

Some of the most important areas where customers benefit include:

    • Geo-distributed, cloud-native architecture: Couchbase delivers consistent benefits regardless of how customers deploy, by allowing them to easily deploy and manage their databases on-premises, in a private cloud, and across public cloud providers, (AWS, Azure, and GCP). With Couchbase, customers get data stored in flexible JSON documents, the familiarity of SQL queries, real-time data analytics aggregation, elastic scalability and a shared-nothing architecture. Customers can deploy on any infrastructure and manage automatically with Couchbase Autonomous Operator with full support for Kubernetes containerization.
    • Cross Data Center Replication (XDCR): An integral component to Couchbase’s support of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies is its ability to interact between Couchbase clusters. XDCR is a built-in feature that synchronizes and replicates data among designated clusters, independent of deployed location. Cross data center replication delivers to customers:
      • Resilience and Disaster Recovery (DR): If a cluster fails for any reason, a separate cluster in the system instantly begins managing the processing of the data.
      • Specificity: Filters and flexible replication controls allow customers to choose exactly how and where certain data lives, like syncing all user data across every cluster but leaving geo-specific information within regional clusters.
      • Integrity: Built-in conflict resolution and auto-recovery from connection issues means data ensures its quality.
      • Efficiency: Only data that is new or changed is replicated.
      • Data Isolation: Clusters can store data where it’s best suited for the use case and audience, such as within a specific locale for performance or data privacy needs.
    • Database-as-a-service (DBaaS): Couchbase’s DBaaS offering gives customers a fully managed version of Couchbase Server as a service, removing the burden of database management. It provides a single control plane that manages clusters across data centers, regions and cloud providers. Through the use of XDCR, data can be synchronized with other Couchbase clusters.

Conclusion

Couchbase’s modern database was designed from the beginning to be cloud-native to provide customers maximum flexibility and make it easy to get consistent benefits across their deployments. In order to support their most critical applications, customers choose Couchbase across a variety of cloud strategies to improve resiliency, performance and stability, while reducing risk and total cost of ownership.

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Author

Posted by Tim Rottach, Director of Product Line Marketing

Tim Rottach is Director of Product Line Marketing at Couchbase.

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