Digital Breadcrumbs for Actionable Insights - Cloud Interoperability Across Provider Boundaries (Guest blog from TCS)
Author: Verity Greig, Director Cloud Transformation - Public Sector, TCS
There are benefits to a multi-cloud strategy such as accessing different technologies from different providers, avoiding vendor lock-in, the ability to negotiate costs, and minimising the risk of downtime or data loss.
However, Ofcom has referred the public cloud market to the Competition and Markets Authority because of perceived technical barriers to interoperability "this makes it more difficult to combine different services across cloud providers" says Ofcom.
Let’s explore the breadcrumbs that organisations can follow to find their way to interoperability in a multi-cloud environment with a quick investigation into the interoperability options from the hyperscalers below:
- API Management and API Gateways offered as platform-as-a-service, supporting the complete API lifecycle, with policies to control how data is exposed to external systems within and across cloud platforms.
- Private Network Connectivity between Cloud Platforms. Transfer data between cloud providers through site-to-site VPN or via a private network to facilitate network connectivity between workloads and services across cloud platforms.
- Data Integration to orchestrate the movement and transformation of data across various datastores. Data Integration Services are primarily designed for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) within the same cloud environment.
- Backend Process Logic Workflows with visual Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) options to help you connect and bring together disparate systems. You can build distributed applications and orchestrate microservices (currently cloud provider specific).
- Message Driven Communication to send and receive messages between cloud applications. Whilst primarily designed for sending notifications within each hyperscalers’ own cloud ecosystem, it is possible to achieve cross-cloud communication by setting up a custom solution.
- Event Driven Architectures for point-to-point integration between event producers and consumers. To directly integrate between cloud providers you would need to create a custom bridge via APIs to connect two event systems. We are starting to see some published reference architectures in this area from the hyperscalers.
- Serverless Functions to execute code in response to events. Hyperscaler services are not designed for cross-cloud orchestration and will require custom solutions that may be challenging to debug and optimise.
Other than at the network connectivity level, it seems that Cloud providers facilitate interoperability with API services.
This includes new services such as Amazon Q Gen AI Chatbot. To integrate Amazon Q with Azure for example, you need to create a custom plugin if you want to use natural language to query data in Azure and take actions in Azure hosted applications.
API Management Services support some of the latest query languages such as GraphQL allowing clients to request and receive only the data they need, which can lead to more efficient data retrieval and reduced network overhead associated with REST.
In conclusion…
We are seeing progress from the major cloud providers. They are publishing interoperable reference architectures and releasing services that support bi-directional data flow with SaaS providers (such as Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow).
There is still responsibility on each buying organisation to manage the interoperability challenge in a multi-cloud environment. This includes evaluating integration architecture choices, maintaining security measures, ensuring data integrity after data exchange, testing, error handling, and not overcomplicating integration solutions with excessive customisation.
For now, independent iPaaS tools might be the easiest path to integrate multi-cloud services. These tools provide a unified interface and pre-built connectors to simplify the integration process combining APIs and messaging to create integrated workflows for applications and services.
Bridging Clouds: Interoperability, portability, multi-vendor strategies and cloud switching
This event will explore the latest industry thinking related to interoperability and portability
Chris Hazell
Sue Daley
Sue Daley
Sue leads techUK's Technology and Innovation work.
This includes work programmes on cloud, data protection, data analytics, AI, digital ethics, Digital Identity and Internet of Things as well as emerging and transformative technologies and innovation policy. She has been recognised as one of the most influential people in UK tech by Computer Weekly's UKtech50 Longlist and in 2021 was inducted into the Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK Tech Hall of Fame. A key influencer in driving forward the data agenda in the UK Sue is co-chair of the UK government's National Data Strategy Forum. As well as being recognised in the UK's Big Data 100 and the Global Top 100 Data Visionaries for 2020 Sue has also been shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and was a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI. In addition to being a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security, Sue was recently a judge for the UK Tech 50 and is a regular judge of the annual UK Cloud Awards.
Prior to joining techUK in January 2015 Sue was responsible for Symantec's Government Relations in the UK and Ireland. She has spoken at events including the UK-China Internet Forum in Beijing, UN IGF and European RSA on issues ranging from data usage and privacy, cloud computing and online child safety. Before joining Symantec, Sue was senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Sue has an BA degree on History and American Studies from Leeds University and a Masters Degree on International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Birmingham. Sue is a keen sportswoman and in 2016 achieved a lifelong ambition to swim the English Channel.
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- [email protected]
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- 020 7331 2055
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- @ChannelSwimSue,@ChannelSwimSue
Laura Foster
Laura Foster
Laura is techUK’s Associate Director for Technology and Innovation.
She supports the application and expansion of emerging technologies, including Quantum Computing, High-Performance Computing, AR/VR/XR and Edge technologies, across the UK. As part of this, she works alongside techUK members and UK Government to champion long-term and sustainable innovation policy that will ensure the UK is a pioneer in science and technology
Before joining techUK, Laura worked internationally as a conference researcher and producer covering enterprise adoption of emerging technologies. This included being part of the strategic team at London Tech Week.
Laura has a degree in History (BA Hons) from Durham University, focussing on regional social history. Outside of work she loves reading, travelling and supporting rugby team St. Helens, where she is from.
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- [email protected]
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- www.linkedin.com/in/lauraalicefoster