Just as organizational leaders continue to try to get their arms around the hybrid cloud or multi-cloud architectures best suited for business workload, application, and database performance—and the cloud service providers (CSPs) ready to accommodate those requirements —along comes polycloud.
Hold up… what’s this “polycloud” about?
At a high-level, this O’Reilly Report offers the following polycloud description:
“Polycloud is one particular model for using multi‐cloud that has gained significant traction in recent years, especially as cloud providers have added higher-order capabilities above basic cloud infrastructure services such as storage, compute, and networking. These higher-order capabilities have encouraged cloud specialization and differentiation. Many applications aim to ignore those differentiations, but polycloud is an architectural model that encourages cloud specialization and differentiation.”
In this blog, we examine the polycloud concept, compare it to pervasive hybrid and multi-cloud models, and define how our fully managed BigAnimal Postgres-as-a-Service unlocks the benefits of running PostgreSQL databases in any public cloud.
Polycloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud—a closer look
Many organizations pursue hybrid and multi-cloud strategies because they don’t have a choice —their technology stacks have grown organically, perhaps through acquisition, and they may recognize that some applications are just too expensive to move to the cloud without a rewrite. These organizations would prefer an elegant architecture with a single vendor, but they’re “resigned” to multi-cloud due to pragmatic realities.
The “polycloud” idea turns this on its head—rather than being resigned to a sprawling technology stack, organizations pursuing a polycloud strategy actively seek to deploy applications in the environment that best suits their needs, based on the strengths and weaknesses of the various clouds (and on-prem infrastructure!). This enables an organization to be more flexible, deploy their resources more cost-effectively, and ultimately build better products for their customers.
Polycloud strategies enable organizations to realize operational, resource, and economic efficiencies, and they benefit significantly from consistency in core infrastructure—such as databases—across environments. EDB’s BigAnimal Postgres-as-a-Service is available across major CSPs, the BigAnimal cloud account, and any mix thereof. By providing cloud choice to customers, BigAnimal provides workload placement flexibility, and, ideally, faster time to market, with hybrid and multi-cloud deployments offering faster “spin up” of test service configurations.
Assimilating integration in polycloud environments
A significant part of building your cloud application involves integrating cloud into your development and test processes. Most mature organizations are going to be standing up and tearing down a cloud database instance as part of their integration testing procedures.
If you’re using a CSP’s first-party hosted database service, then your developers are frequently rewriting their software to accommodate those cloud environments. Whereas with BigAnimal assimilating into polycloud environments, developers are merely reusing the same APIs in a process that is straightforward.
Single-vendor approach benefits in polycloud
Many organizations running multi-cloud environments have business units on the cloud. However, they don’t have a lot of individual applications that need to run on multiple clouds. In the context of your application development and DBA teams, it is beneficial to have a single-vendor Postgres mode, as it supports your security and compliance postures.
For CTOs and CIOs trying to manage everyday multi-cloud considerations, this single-vendor approach also enhances their ability to understand how databases are working at a business level, with disaster recovery, business continuity, and compliance operating the same across all business units.
In providing a truly hybrid PostgreSQL organizational model (beyond Polycloud), the single-vendor EDB approach offers flexible Postgres deployment options to fit the needs of any organization—self-managed on-premises, fully managed by EDB in the cloud, or a hybrid of the two.
Multi-cloud to multi-cloud support benefits for ISVs and Development teams
For independent software vendors, it is quite important to have a multi-cloud to multi-cloud support model, because you want:
- Your customers to be able to deploy your software on your different clouds
- Enhance your customers’ abilities to work anywhere
- The ability to lower your software costs with the ability to run on multiple clouds.
For ISVs and developers looking to capitalize on the promise of policy, BigAnimal is the only solution today that supports Postgres in this emerging cloud model.
For more information about how polycould offers benefits to your organization, read this O’Reilly Report.
Ready to see BigAnimal Postgres-as-a-Service in action? Get started for free with $300 in credits.