Cloud Nimble: The Next Evolution for Multi-Cloud and Hybrid DevOps

Over the last several years, systems architects have had to make sure their systems are cloud native, with applications that are optimized for scalable cloud technology infrastructure.

In today’s environment, you should be asking whether your solutions are cloud nimble as well.

For the modern enterprise, cloud computing is now the default model for applications, storage, and compute. As the range of providers and services expand, organizations recognize that cloud is the key to business modernization.

As leading enterprises evolve their business transformation through cloud computing, more rely on hybrid and multi-cloud architectures to speed innovation, stay best-in-class, and reduce the risk of vendor lock-in. 

What’s become clear is that cloud native solutions were only the start for running agile, scalable operations in cloud and hybrid environments. Forward-looking DevOps engineers must also seek solutions that are cloud nimble: operationally consistent platforms that empower you to choose, and enable you to spread critical workloads across multiple domains both public and private.

The Rising Clouds of Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

Organizations have found the benefits of using the cloud to innovate fast, and to make bold digital bets at minimum cost and risk while being able to scale elastically. The modern enterprise is now cloud-enabled, software-driven, and virtual.

In 2021, 83 percent of enterprises report cloud spend of more than $1.2 million, including 36 percent spending $12 million and above.

As this modernization proceeds, it’s also become evident to these organizations that placing critical workloads into the hands of just a single cloud provider comes with its own risks. 

In a 2021 survey of over 7,000 companies across 29 industries, only three percent reported using a single private or public cloud — down from 29 percent two years before. Fifty-nine percent of respondents claim to use a hybrid mix of private and public clouds (IBM, Cloud’s Next Leap, 2021).

Nearly four-fifths of those survey respondents say that the ability to have workloads be completely portable with no vendor lock-in is extremely important to achieving their digital transformation goals.  

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are fast becoming the most popular IT architectures for cloud service delivery, as enterprises seek even greater agility for their virtual operations through divestment from a single cloud provider.

The Cloud Nimble Enterprise

In this next iteration of enterprise cloud computing, it’s not enough for operations to be cloud native. They must be cloud nimble as well. 

Cloud nimble enterprises demand the ability to run in any cloud, anywhere, so they can:

• Match cloud choice to best-in-class services for given tasks
• Allocate workloads to the lowest-cost provider for each
• Shift workloads for load balancing or to adjusting to demand pricing
• Keep data and compute services in geo proximity
• Maintain redundancy to help ensure five nines availability
• Employ a hybrid strategy to comply with security and/or regulatory requirements

A cloud nimble enterprise is better able to adapt to change without losing balance or speed. 

The JFrog DevOps Platform is the market-leading set of solutions that enable a binaries-driven formula for DevOps success. It meets the cloud nimble requirements of today’s enterprises to enable full flexibility and operating consistency across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Consistent Operating Model

Often, there can be significant functional differences between a self-managed version of an application and its SaaS offering. When versions don’t have fully equivalent capabilities across all environments, it can be a major obstacle to maintaining a consistent model for DevOps.

The cloud native JFrog Platform provides the full market-leading feature set in every operating environment, enabling you to operate your SDLC across clouds with the same best practices for DevOps success.

Distribute Across Best-in-Class Services

Where one cloud may provide the most optimal storage services or security, another may offer the best-of-breed VCS or automation. Teams targeting different computing languages or runtimes may prefer to choose their own cloud-based development toolset. Each may require locality within their own cloud service for fast access in delay-sensitive applications.

The cloud nimble JFrog Platform empowers Site Reliability Engineers with the freedom to choose best-fit cloud providers for different segments of the SDLC or to satisfy the particular needs of a diverse set of teams, while maintaining governance of packages and binaries within a secure, single circle of trust.

Maintain a Consistent Security Posture

Operating with a diverse ecosystem of cloud-based platforms, tools, and services each with their own protections, can make it challenging to maintain a consistent security posture throughout a software development lifecycle (SDLC).

JFrog Artifactory’s fine-grained permissions and its integration with single sign-on through multiple protocols empower organizations to maintain the same high-quality protection of their software supply chain across multiple cloud domains.  With JFrog Xray, you can operate with consistent monitoring, reporting, and remediation of vulnerabilities and compliance scanning across all cloud environments.

Choose Your Cloud For SaaS

You can’t have a multi cloud SaaS strategy if you have only one cloud choice. 

JFrog’s cloud nimble solution provides both choice and transparency. With the freedom to host a JFrog Platform account on any or each of the three major cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure), you can ensure data proximity to the cloud ecosystem tools your teams will use.

For ease of billing, you can create a JFrog account through any of the cloud providers marketplaces, and pay your monthly subscription through your existing cloud credits.

Multi-Domain Automation

Using JFrog APIs, enterprises can securely deliver binaries and release payloads from one cloud environment to another, and interoperate your SDLC between JFrog Platform deployments.

Replication of repositories enables your teams to share artifacts and builds across domains, regions and providers, while preserving data locality for each team to operate with a common set of DevOps practices at full speed. 

Accelerate Cloud Migration

Maintain operational continuity even after migrating Gigabytes or Terabytes of accumulated packages, builds, and metadata from one JFrog Platform instance to another in the cloud.

With a consistent feature set in every environment, your development teams can switch over to a newly migrated cloud installation without any break. Ideally, they may never even know that there’s been a change.

Release DevOps Into the Clouds

When you adopt binary management and SDLC best practices with the cloud nimble JFrog Platform, you enable full flexibility and operating consistency without tradeoffs across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. Innovate faster, maximize vendor choice and flexibility and optimize your capital expenditure mix with a consistent security posture and best-in-class operating model.