What’s the definition of Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud?
Sort by:
I may be wrong but my understanding is that Hybrid Cloud refers to Private Cloud and Public Cloud. e.g. your private Data Center connected to your Public Cloud environment. And Multi-Cloud would refer to having existence on multiple public clouds, e.g. Azure, AWS etc.
For definitions, I use the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing. They define hybrid cloud as: the cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).
NIST does not have a definition of multi-cloud. But a general definition is the use of multiple cloud computing/storage services in a single network architecture.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf
Definition is easier than use cases or reality... hybrid for me is combinations of distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, public) that are unique but have data and application portability (and not lift-and-shift portability). Multi or poly cloud are the use of multiple, but not necessarily bound together at that depth. Folks can discuss data that flows between IDaaS and SaaS SEIM providers...
Overall I find that having a common definition is helpful for architects, security teams, reliability engineers or such to understand what they are discussing. Otherwise, the ship for us to have one definition has been sailed by marketing long ago.
Initially I take a very purist approach, similar to Tim's. Multi-cloud means you're running a single application across multiple cloud providers, and you're benefiting from the availability of all of them, and mitigating against downtime. I think I'll augment that with, there's different services on the major CSPs that you want to leverage for parts of your initiative. Meaning, Google TensorFlow for ML is possibly better than SageMaker AWS, and that's a religious decision, and then you can augment, or segment that out. But I would argue that most enterprises today struggle with the single cloud strategy in management and cost efficiencies. And then if you extrapolate that across, multi-cloud, it just increases exponentially. We're in the early days of people figuring out, "Multi-cloud?"
So I'll just maybe augment that a little bit, Mike, and say that the multi-cloud, I agree with you, there's a specific reason why you might choose a second, or third, or fourth cloud provider, but there's an advantage to focusing on one. And most enterprises that I work with focus on one, and then come back, second or third for specific reasons. But getting to that hybrid cloud, I actually don't see a single-use case in production today that I'm aware of, for cloud bursting specifically. And I haven't seen that play out in the enterprise. What I have seen play out is where things like regulatory and compliance and privacy requirements start to come into play, sometimes cultural issues. We've all faced the cultural norms that fly in the face of what we can do versus what we want to do. I would love to be able to use public cloud for a given application or given data set, but I can't, for a specific reason, and so then it's pulled back locally. Whether that reason is valid or not, we can argue until the cows come home.
It has become a stretch term and is more used interchangeable meanings. Some time back, I understand
1. Hybrid cloud includes data center virtualization, private and public cloud. Onnpremise to cloud connectivity plays important role here
2. Multi cloud is existence of multiple public clouds such as AWS, Azure, GCP or other hyperscalers in technology architect of a organization.
However, as mentioned, now a days it's most used almost with interchangeable meanings
Interesting question, looking for opinions of others. Thanks for asking.