Many companies (55%) are using two or more public clouds to gain benefits such as cost optimization, broader service options, and to avoid vendor lock-in, according to the 2020 IDG Cloud Computing Survey. At the same time, they plan to continue retaining apps and workloads in on-premises or private clouds.
These hybrid environments cause new challenges, according to the survey. Most significantly, organizations report increased complexity and higher costs associated with management issues.
“If you had three public clouds in your multi-cloud, you would need three different interfaces and three types of skill sets,” writes David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Security Officer at Deloitte Consulting, in InfoWorld. “It’s hard to operationalize that longer term—too much complexity.”
Gaining expertise in multiple areas is a tough ask. Many companies cited lack of cloud development and operational skills as top challenges in the IDG survey. And then there’s ongoing management and maintenance across clouds. Where integration is a challenge, the long-term ramifications of ensuring seamless orchestration of services is time-consuming and complex.
Ultimately, these challenges can increase costs and slow IT services delivery. And when that affects application development and deployment, it correspondingly slows the ability to achieve business outcomes — like speed to market, competitive advantage, and increased productivity.
How Kubernetes Helps
Kubernetes can help organizations overcome these obstacles, while enabling all the benefits of multi-cloud. It’s an open-source system that incorporates functionality such as automation, integration, and self-service. It provides a unified environment for development and deployment that enables teams to efficiently manage and modernize applications — across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Specifically, Kubernetes is a platform that orchestrates and manages the development of containers, which package up all the services and elements associated with building and running an application, such as binary code, libraries, and configuration files. Containers allow developers to seamlessly code, test, and run new or re-architected workloads without interfering with other applications. Containers not only speed development and deployment, they also provide app portability to help avoid vendor lock-in.
Importantly, the right Kubernetes solution brings consistency to containerized environments across private and public clouds. It can support collaboration between teams by providing operational consistency and reducing the amount of low-value tasks for developers, as well as unifying the necessary resources with automation. Doing so reduces complexity, streamlines integration, and improves productivity — all of which speed application development.
Not all enterprise-ready Kubernetes platforms are built the same. It’s important to seek a solution that increases application portability, reduces complexity, and improves the overall management of the hybrid cloud environment.
Finally, look to implement a Kubernetes platform that is future-proof. That means working with a provider that is part of a robust partner ecosystem that works to solve challenges across a wide range of use cases, technologies, and business needs.
For more information on incorporating Kubernetes into your hybrid cloud strategy, visit: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/containers-and-kubernetes-can-be-essential-hybrid-cloud-computing-strategy