Cloud agnostic development: Pros and cons, tips and tools

Recent research by Flexera shows that 89% of companies worldwide utilize multiple or hybrid clouds to avoid vendor lock-in or maximize business value from using different providers. Even if you are currently planning to use a single cloud, it's good to know that you can switch providers at any given moment with little to no problems. But how can you reduce dependence on a single cloud provider and design your cloud agnostic applications for compatibility with different cloud services? Let's find out in the article.

Cloud agnostic meaning

Cloud agnostic architecture is designed to be neutral toward using a specific cloud. Some experts believe that a truly vendor-independent approach uses every opportunity to create a highly portable system. Such systems allow you to switch cloud providers easily. Other tech experts think that cloud agnostic architecture includes using multiple public clouds simultaneously. Moreover, building a solution using a vendor-independent approach, even with on-premises infrastructure, will help migrate it to the cloud in the future and make such migration resource-effective (both time- and cost-wise).

Major reasons for going cloud agnostic

There might be several reasons behind the decision to become vendor-independent. First and foremost, the danger of vendor lock-in. According to Statista, 24% of respondents are cautious about becoming too dependent on a single vendor among the companies that either implement or consider cloud adoption.

Risks of the vendor lock-in

• Vendors can change their products or offerings, shifting focus to new technology or different business needs, so they no longer align with your expectations.
• If the quality of service declines or does not meet your expectations over time, you may be stuck with it due to the legal commitments or your dependency on that specific service building your vendor lock-in.
• Any vendor can significantly change its price for the service, or you can get an attractive deal from a different cloud provider.
• Vendors can go out of business.

You can see some of the most common risks and concerns associated with vendor lock-in on the chart below.

Another reason companies go cloud agnostic is their choice of multi-cloud or hybrid strategy. A recent study shows that only 11% are using either a single private or a single public cloud.

So roughly half of the companies chose to go multi-cloud and avoid the proverbial basket with all the eggs in one basket. But how do you manage multi-cloud environments successfully? The answer is agnostic architecture. So what are some other benefits and challenges of the agnostic approach?

The pros and cons of a cloud agnostic strategy

If planned and executed properly, such a strategy can be highly beneficial from both business and technical perspectives.

The pros of being cloud agnostic

• No vendor lock-in. One of the apparent benefits is the ability to avoid vendor lock-in. This strategy allows companies to 'diversify their portfolio' and become more flexible to changes in the IT landscape.
• Easier risk management. Managing the risks or changing tactics is easier if you are not dependent on a single provider.
• More customization and flexibility. Combining a vendor-independent approach with multi-cloud allows you to adjust the cloud adoption roadmap to your needs.
• Access to open-source technologies. Having access to various technologies will help you expand your tech stack and tweak the strategy to fit your needs.
• Easier migration. It will be relatively easy to migrate from one cloud provider to another or add another provider to your list.
• Maximum coverage. If your system operates across multiple clouds or can be easily migrated to a new one, you are protected if you or a vendor face any issues.
• Better consistency. Vendor-independent approach allows you to achieve cross-cloud consistency while using multiple clouds.

The cons of cloud agnostic approach

Unfortunately, the agnostic approach is not your regular go-to approach as it has some challenges as well:

• Lowest common denominator. Being cloud agnostic for no reason can result in reduced performance and missed opportunities for leveraging the unique features of specific cloud providers. This often creates a more complex environment that limits innovation and may increase overall costs as organizations fail to optimize for the best tools available.
• Price. In some cases, the initial development cost may be higher than that for a specific cloud provider. But on the other hand, it often pays off long-term even if cloud agnostic was not a part of the initial strategy.
• More complicated deployment* and day-2 operations. In the case of the multi-cloud approach, you will be deploying to and monitoring multiple platforms at once.

*Agnostic deployment should be designed to run seamlessly on different cloud platforms or between on-premises hardware and cloud platforms.

Tips and tools for a successful cloud agnostic strategy

While there is no right or wrong way to adopt the vendor-independent strategy, there are several proven practices to consider.

Adopt automation early in the process

The agnostic strategy can increase the workload on DevOps engineers, so you should focus on the automated-first approach. Your infrastructure should be easily scalable with little to no manual effort. The same principle should be applied to CI/CD pipelines. Many tools help users set up CI/CD processes. Some are open-source, like Spinnaker and Jenkings, while others are commercial tools, e.g., Bamboo or CircleCI.

Opt for microservices architecture

Whether you are working on a legacy application or a new product, considering microservices can be quite beneficial. First of all, microservices allow you to break down an app into separate modules, making applications more accessible to develop, test, and deploy. It also helps you scale an app, migrate it if needed, and introduce new technologies. Moreover, microservices architecture reduces your dependency on a particular tech stack and perfectly pairs with container-based platforms.

You might also like: Microservices vs Monolith: which architecture is the best choice?

Containerize your application

Containerization technologies such as Open Container Initiative (OCI), RedHat CoreOS Rkt, or Docker will help you make your application portable. Containers package all OS-level dependencies, runtime, libraries, and configuration with your application into one runnable image. This means that containers can, with minor exceptions, be launched on almost any platform without customizing the host environment.

One other significant benefit of containerization is increased workload density. Compared to virtual machines (VMs), containers are much more efficient in using computing resources, resulting in cost and time optimization.

If you want to avoid vendor lock-in, containerization, backed by cloud agnostic container orchestration platforms, is your best choice.

Use Infrastructure as code (IaC)

Every cloud vendor has its own mechanism for running infrastructure templates; however, the vendor-specific syntax of each tool makes it much harder to switch from one provider to another. With the agnostic approach, you can use third-party tools that allow you to script your infrastructure on the leading cloud providers, giving you an abstraction layer for the underlying IaaS.

Because of scope and complexity, there are not too many tools that can support IaC in vendor-independent setups: Cloud Foundry BOSH, Red Hat Ansible, and Hashicorp Terraform, which is the most popular in cloud agnostic IaC setups. Terraform provides you with APIs to work with each of the leading public cloud providers and many on-prem virtualization platforms.

Go for сontainer orchestration

While containerization provides benefits on its own, it wouldn't be nearly as valuable as with container orchestration engines. These runtime platforms allow you to run, coordinate, and manage the lifecycle of containerized workloads. For a vendor-independent deployment, there should be no binding between the workloads and the underlying cloud infrastructure, and the best way is to run your containerized workloads on a cloud agnostic container orchestration platform.

There are quite a few platforms that can run containerized workloads on different kinds of infrastructure, including public cloud IaaS, private clouds, or on-prem: Cloud Foundry, DC/OS (the Distributed Cloud Operating System), Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad, and, definitely, Kubernetes which became an industry standard over the last couple of years.

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions

For companies that choose a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, finding a toolkit that will help them manage these environments is crucial. One of the instruments that allows users to build, manage, and operate across clouds with consistent infrastructure and operations is VMware.

Their solutions help run applications from the data center to the cloud to the edge. VMware also encourages users to:

• Modernize existing applications through containerization;
• Migrate an existing app without rewriting it;
• And integrate new cloud services to expand application value.

Cloud-native architecture

Technologies and tools play an essential role in building applications and setting up processes. They can even drive good decisions, but understanding the core concepts of target architecture is far more crucial. Following cloud-native principles in the architecture of your solutions will help you leverage maximum value from agnostic platforms (PaaS) or agnostic usage of specific public or private clouds (IaaS) and choose appropriate tools and tech stack.

Want to go cloud agnostic? Let N-iX help you!

We have a strong portfolio of cloud projects across various industries: telecom, fintech, healthcare, retail, and more. Many are multi-cloud consumers following a vendor-independent approach. With dozens of skilled cloud experts on board, we are fully equipped to help you develop agnostic apps or move your existing applications to the cloud without worrying about vendor choice.

1. N-iX is partnering with three leading cloud providers being an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, a Microsoft Solutions Partner, and a Google Cloud Platform Partner.
2. We guarantee to adjust to data security regulations for our clients by complying with PCI DSS, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and GDPR standards;
3. We offer professional DevOps services, including cloud adoption (architecture, migration, optimization), building and streamlining CI/CD processes, security issues detection/prevention (DDOS & intrusion), firewall-as-a-service, and more;
4. N-iX has broad data expertise to design different data solutions: Big Data / Data Warehouse / Data lake, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning.

We will help you:

• Define the best cloud strategy for your business case;
• Create a roadmap that will mitigate the potential risk of vendor lock-in;
• Develop a solution that fits your needs. From cloud readiness assessment and cloud strategy development to infrastructure setup, architecture redesign, migration, and maintenance-we are here to guide your journey to successful cloud adoption!

Featured case study: Using cloud-neutral technology to avoid vendor lock-in and benefit from different cloud providers.

Our client is a Fortune 500 industrial supply company. As a part of its data management strategy change, this company needed to extend its data warehouse solution, collecting data from multiple departments. Our client also wanted to migrate the solution to the cloud to make it more scalable and cost-efficient. They did not want to commit to a single vendor; thus, the system had to be vendor-independent.

To migrate from the on-premises Hadoop Hortonworks cluster to a selected cloud platform and allow the processing of additional cloud data, the N-iX team built a dedicated big data platform from scratch. Also, we have been involved in extending and supporting the existing Teradata solution.

Our specialists created a proof of concept to choose the data warehouse design and the tech stack that fits our client's business needs. We compared Amazon Redshift with Snowflake and preferred Snowflake as it met the client's cloud neutrality approach: it can quickly scale up and down any amount of computing power for any number of workloads and across any combination of clouds.

The whole development process is cloud agnostic and is designed to ensure that the client can easily change the cloud provider in the future. For example, we use Terraform as it is compatible with all major cloud vendors-AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.