Mastering Multi-Cloud Management: a Civo Webinar

On November 15, 2023, I had the privilege of co-hosting a webinar with Saiyam Pathak, the CTO at Civo, where we delved into the intricacies of Mastering Multi-Cloud Management. During the hour-long session, Saiyam kicked things off by providing a comprehensive overview of the cloud, highlighting its management challenges, and highlighting the advantages of venturing into the realm of Multi-cloud architectures. The session served as a valuable refresher on the current landscape of Multi-cloud use cases and management tools.

In this blog post, we'll revisit the key topics covered in the webinar, ensuring you're fully informed about everything you may have missed. So, without further ado, let's dive right in.

The Cloud and it’s Challenges

Over the past decade, there has been a monumental surge in cloud adoption, transcending specific industries. Companies across the board have consistently migrated their workloads to the cloud, driven by the anticipation of capitalizing on the substantial advantages offered by participating in the expansive economies of scale inherent in cloud computing. Gone are the days when organizations had to construct their bespoke data centers unless necessitated by the creation of highly specialized and security-specific environments.

The cloud has always promised the ability to achieve more, faster, and at a lower cost. However, this journey is not without its challenges. Saiyam highlighted various instances of outages, meltdowns, and breaches, unfortunately underscoring the prevalence of such issues in the dynamic realm of cloud computing.

• Google Cloud slips over in Europe amid water leak, fire
• AWS experiment with Lambda in cloudless configuration fails to impress
• Microsoft battles through two 365 outages in one day
• Global Slack messaging outage cuts world off from colleagues

The power of Multi-cloud

Acknowledging that the cloud isn't a seamless solution or a straightforward endeavor, anyone with experience in a cloud environment recognizes that as complexity increases in architectural design, so does the likelihood of encountering unexpected challenges. These complexities often manifest as outages, leaks, hacks, and inefficiencies. Given these issues in single-cloud environments, one might question the feasibility of incorporating multi-cloud infrastructures.

However, amidst these challenges, there are multiple advantages to consider. Let's delve into the various upsides of embracing multi-cloud architectures.

Why bother with Multi-cloud and why is it hard?

As Saiyam mentioned in his presentation, “Multi-cloud is the art of not putting all your digital eggs in one cloud basket”.

The PROs

Facilitating Cultural Transformation

Similar to the top-down, in-house cultural shift required for the widespread adoption of DevOps practices, embracing a multi-cloud infrastructure demands a comparable cultural transformation. Executed effectively, this shift can lead to enduring and transformative changes in how an organization delivers value.

Enhancing Resilience Against External Challenges

Multi-cloud environments offer the flexibility to replicate across different cloud providers, regions, or accounts. Implementing failover mechanisms enables swift responses to emerging issues, thereby minimizing downtime and disruptions.

Mitigating Human Error

By dispersing workloads across multiple accounts and cloud providers, safeguards can be implemented to enhance resilience against both internal and external threats and errors. This distributed approach reduces the impact of human mistakes on the overall system.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

Crucially, multi-cloud strategies liberate organizations from being tied to a specific cloud infrastructure offering from any single provider. As workload requirements and product specifications evolve, another cloud provider's managed service might become a perfect fit. Embracing multi-cloud opens up the entire landscape of cloud vendors, offering a diverse menu of options to meet changing needs.

The CONs

Cost Challenges

Managing multiple redundant workloads, if not optimized, can rapidly escalate costs. Organizations may also face issues with soaring data transfer expenses, adding to the financial burden. Additionally, the task of tracking and managing these diverse costs can become cumbersome.

Technical Skill Shortage

Each cloud environment comes with its own set of peculiarities and specifications, demanding a substantial investment of time for learning, fine-tuning, and securing. Cloud engineers, in particular, grapple with the ongoing need to adapt and acquire new skills to stay in accordance with the ever-evolving industry practices, workflow feature developments, and the constant pressures put on their systems. Given the high level of expertise required, finding and cultivating skilled cloud engineers poses a significant challenge.

Unified Control Panels

In a multi-cloud setting, management panels are typically decentralized, especially when relying solely on the management consoles provided by individual cloud providers. As expected, these providers are inherently inclined to prioritize optimizations for users on their own platforms rather than accommodating compatibility for seamless multi-provider interoperability.

Addressing this significant gap in multi-cloud management, various tools have been developed to tackle these complex challenges. Let's delve deeper into the landscape of tools designed to address the specific intricacies of managing a multi-cloud environment.

OSS Tools to the rescue

Opencost

OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open-source project for measuring and allocating cloud infrastructure and container costs. It’s built for Kubernetes cost monitoring to power real-time cost monitoring, showback, and chargeback.

Link to GitHub repository: opencost

Koku

Koku is an open-source solution for cost management of clouds, containers, and hybrid cloud environments. It is designed to identify and report cost data associated with various sources, which allows your enterprise to make decisions on visibility, analysis, and optimization.

Link to Koku on GitHub: Koku​

Optscale

FinOps & MLOps open source platform to optimize any cloud workload performance and infrastructure cost. Cloud cost optimization, VM rightsizing, PaaS instrumentation, S3 duplicate finder, RI/SP usage, anomaly detection + AI developer tools for ML teams for optimal cloud utilization: ML/AI leaderboards, experiment tracking, ML experiment profiling, performance and cost optimization.

Link to Optscale on GitHub: optscale​

Komiser

Komiser is a cloud-agnostic resource manager, the open-source version Tailwarden (Enterprise version).

It integrates with multiple cloud providers and builds a cloud asset inventory, and helps you gain detailed insights into your cloud infrastructure.

Link to Komiser on GitHub: komiser ​

A closer look at Komiser

Build a resource inventory

With a straightforward config.toml file, Komiser empowers you to authenticate multiple cloud accounts effortlessly. Upon execution, Komiser initiates a fetching process, constructing an automatic cloud resource inventory. Any resources present in your environment seamlessly populate the inventory. This dependable and comprehensive resource list marks the initial stride toward efficient multi-cloud management.

Creating a multi-Civo account configuration file is a breeze. For detailed instructions, refer to the Komiser documentation.

‍

Populated cloud resource inventory

Powerful tagging and filtering options

Once armed with a comprehensive cloud resource inventory, we can delve into our environment, extracting valuable insights. Rather than approaching this from a feature-centric perspective, consider the following scenarios:

• You need to locate and remove an unnecessary object store, but you're uncertain about the account and region it resides in. The unused object store is consuming valuable budget resources.
• You aim to enhance awareness of service costs among different developer squads without bombarding them with monthly bills. What's the most effective approach?

Solving these challenges becomes more manageable with a robust tagging and filterable mechanism. Fortunately, Komiser not only identifies tags within your cloud provider but also allows tagging at the Komiser level. Filtering by tags provides an incredibly efficient means of pinpointing specific resources and grouping them by categories such as teams or projects.

Custom alerts

With Komiser creating custom cost and resource alerts is super easy. Just filter your resources, save the filter as a custom view, and apply it to that particular view.Some alerts you might find helpful:

• Expensive resources of a certain subsection of services
• Untagged resources
• Resources provisioned in a certain time frame
• Kubernetes cluster scale-out events

The destination of the alert can be a slack channel or a custom webhook endpoint.

Enhancing Visibility with the Resource Dependency Graph

While a list offers limited insights, the Resource Dependency Graph, accessible through the Explorer page on Komiser, provides a multidimensional view of your Civo resources. This graph allows you to observe the intricate connections and interactions among your resources. With a quick glance, identify isolated, underutilized, or forgotten resources, gaining a comprehensive understanding of your ecosystem.

Undoubtedly, managing multi-cloud environments poses significant challenges, with complexities that may, at times, seem difficult to rationalize. Fortunately, though a vibrant and rapidly expanding ecosystem of open-source tools exist and is at your disposal. These tools are designed to make the realization of the substantial advantages offered by multi-cloud environments more accessible. Hopefully, some of the tools listed here prove valuable in easing your journey through the complexities of multi-cloud management.

Huge thanks to Civo Cloud and Saiyam Pathak for having me on for the webinar. It was an absolute pleasure.

‍