Multi-cloud is an infrastructure deployment strategy that uses multiple public cloud providers to fulfill a set of important functions. A multi-cloud deployment can also leverage private cloud platforms—effectively forming a hybrid cloud environment. However, a typical hybrid cloud would include both on-premises infrastructure and often a public cloud, which is where the distinction comes in.
A multi-cloud deployment can leverage a variety of solution types, such as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), or function-as-a-service (FaaS). While the public cloud market is dominated by a few key players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—all sharing many core functions—a multi-cloud deployment lets organizations use the unique products and services they need no matter where they reside.
What makes multi-cloud useful?
Multi-cloud strategies keep organizations from throwing all their eggs in one technological basket by allowing for diversification. That might include reserving computing resources through AWS while setting up a database elsewhere, or using any other combination of vendors and services.
Vendor lock-in remains a major concern for many and multi-cloud can mitigate or prevent that. Spreading your infrastructure across multiple places allows for easier migration and innovation. This lets companies experiment with emerging technologies, stay on the cutting edge, and pick and choose the cloud solutions that best match their evolving tech stack.
Similarly, freedom of choice also allows organizations to choose the solutions most economically viable to them. Under the restrictions of a single-vendor contract, that same organization might be more vulnerable to price hikes and related uncertainty.
A multi-cloud approach also introduces redundancy—enabling high availability through failover protection. When a cloud or service suffers an outage, applications and databases hosted externally can still provide users with access to vital information. One cloud can also serve as a backup to another, providing data protection and increased uptime.
Are there downsides to multi-cloud?
No infrastructure strategy is perfect, and this is certainly true for multi-cloud. This kind of strategy introduces some important drawbacks worth considering:
More complexity – Organizations have to manage data and other resources that live in multiple places (and platforms), often with no centralized control plane to help streamline those processes and observability.
Enlarged attack surfaces – By making your infrastructure more sprawling, bad actors have a larger target to attack and more potential vulnerabilities to exploit.
Increased latency – If an application hosted at public cloud A must communicate with a database hosted at public cloud B (for example), that extra layer of separation can cause data transmission delays.
Performance optimization – With workloads spread across clouds, it's more challenging to set up effective load balancing, security, and resource use at scale.
Does HAProxy support multi-cloud?
Yes! HAProxy products are built to run almost anywhere. Organizations deploy HAProxy products to deliver web applications and APIs with the utmost performance, flexibility, and security at any scale—in any environment.
To learn more about our flexible multi-cloud support and its importance, check out our blogs on Why Your Load Should be Fast and Flexible or How to Achieve Ultimate Freedom With Your Load Balancer.
