Cross-Cloud: The Next Evolution in Cloud Computing?

Multicloud is good. Cross-cloud is even better.

That, in a nutshell, sums up the logic behind cross-cloud, an emerging trend in the realm of cloud computing. Keep reading for a deeper dive into what cross-cloud means, how it builds upon traditional multicloud architectures, and why cross-cloud could turn out to be a big deal — or not.

What Is Cross-Cloud?

Cross-cloud is a cloud computing strategy that makes it possible to run the same workload on multiple clouds simultaneously. For instance, a cross-cloud application might have its front end hosted in one public cloud and its back end in another.

In essence, cross-cloud creates an abstraction layer that makes the underlying cloud platforms unimportant from the perspective of a workload. This gives organizations the flexibility to treat all of the clouds they use as one unified platform.

Cross-Cloud vs. Multicloud

The key difference between cross-cloud and multicloud is that cross-cloud spreads the same workload across-clouds. In contrast, multicloud simply means using more than one public cloud at the same time — with one cloud hosting some workloads and other clouds hosting other workloads.

Benefits of Cross-Cloud vs. Multicloud

This difference leads to somewhat different benefits of cross-cloud versus multicloud. The main advantage of cross-cloud is that it increases application resilience by hosting it on multiple clouds at once — so if one cloud goes down, the app will continue operating.

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That said, in other respects, cross-cloud and multicloud offer similar benefits — although cross-cloud allows organizations to double down on some of those benefits. For instance, a multicloud strategy can help reduce cloud costs by allowing you to pick and choose from among multiple clouds for different types of workloads, depending on which cloud offers the best pricing for different types of services. One cloud might offer more cost-effective virtual servers, for example, while another has cheaper object storage. As a result, you use one cloud to host VM-based workloads and another to store data.

You can do something similar with cross-cloud, but in a more granular way. Instead of having to devote an entire workload to one cloud or another depending on which cloud offers the best overall pricing for that type of workload, you can run some parts of the workload on one cloud and others on a different cloud. Theoretically, this would lead to the best possible cost savings.

How to Adopt a Cross-Cloud Strategy

To date, there has been a fair amount of talk about cross-cloud, but relatively little in the way of development of tools and platforms to enable cross-cloud strategies.

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There are certainly plenty of tools that work across multiple clouds — meaning they can support workloads that are hosted in, say, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. But just because they are compatible with multiple clouds doesn't translate to a unified cloud platform and experience.

A multicloud observability tool might still collect different metrics from different clouds, for example, so you'd need to learn to interpret each cloud's metric types to use the tool effectively. Likewise, a multicloud application deployment tool might bring consistency to the process of deploying apps on different clouds, but you'd still need to provision each underlying cloud environment separately before you could deploy.

There are also platforms like Kubernetes, which abstract workloads from underlying infrastructure. In theory, you could use Kubernetes to enable a cross-cloud strategy. But Kubernetes is hard enough to manage when you host clusters on a single cloud. Trying to create a cluster that spans multiple clouds would be really hard, and it's not a use case that Kubernetes was designed to support.

The lack of tools and platforms designed specifically for cross-cloud architectures makes it challenging at present to go cross-cloud. You could do it, but it will be an uphill battle from a technical perspective.

Cross-Cloud and the Future of Cloud Computing

Going cross-cloud could become much easier if vendors were to invest in solutions designed specifically for cross-cloud scenarios. It's plausible that vendors will want to do this because arguably, cross-cloud is one of the few areas where there remains opportunity to innovate within the world of the cloud.

After all, most cloud platforms are by now very mature, and traditional hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies are nothing new. But cross-cloud is new, and it stands to provide benefits that other cloud strategies can't. For that reason, vendors that are able to make cross-cloud strategies possible are likely to enjoy a lot of success in the market.

Conclusion

For now, it remains to be seen whether cross-cloud will just be an interesting idea that is hard to put into practice, or if we'll see a number of organizations embrace cross-cloud as the next big thing. The answer is likely to hinge on how easy cloud software vendors make it to deploy workloads across clouds.