How to Manage Multi-Cloud (AWS, Azure & GCP) Workloads with a Small Team

Over the last +7 years, I have been working as a Cloud Architect with AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, and over the last few years, I saw massive growth in the adoption of multi-cloud environments. Also, I experimented first hand, an increment in complexity in managing these environments.

In this post, we are going to take a quick look at a great tool I found for dealing with complex IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) multi-cloud environments: InfraGuard, which allow as to manage AWS, Azure & GCP virtual machines from a “Single Pane of Glass” Dashboard.

Since AWS was launched back in 2002, it initiated a cloud journey for most enterprises and changed the technology world. According to the Right Scale’s annual State of the Cloud Report for 2019, 91% of businesses have started using the public cloud. Further, new businesses are now born on the cloud and teams are being trained specifically for managing these workloads.

As is tradition, new breakthroughs lead to new challenges. One that I noticed over the past decades is the massive adoption of the Big 3 Cloud Providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) is the need for skilled personnel for each cloud provider — because of management consoles and services of each one are very different. Even doing simple actions such as rebooting or running scripts requires different workflows and more importantly different access mechanisms.

This seemingly simple problem gets complicated quite fast. Console switching has its own cost and increases error rates.

To me, the problem could be solved by working through a single dashboard. Training our team will be easier and flows will be managed faster.

A lot of enterprises have multi-cloud as their strategy. Would you want to create separate teams for each cloud, which will necessitate on-going training as the platforms change, or would you have one central team? After all, the desired outcome must be secure, efficient, and secure operations at the lowest cost — and this is where InfraGuard shines.

Of course, viewing and taking bulk actions across providers is just one part of the game. We would also want a granular way of managing access and performing automated workflows.