Nearly 20 years after the launch of the first public cloud computing platforms, organizations are continuing to migrate legacy applications into the cloud, modernize legacy applications with cloud native architectures, and implement hybrid cloud environments to optimize and secure their most critical workloads. Despite the well-known benefits of deploying and operating applications in the cloud (e.g., high availability, seamless scalability, pay-per-use pricing, etc.), organizations are still concerned about single-cloud dependency and the potential drawbacks of applications that can only run on a single public cloud platform. The solution for these organizations is cloud agnostic application development, an approach to software design and deployment that maximizes application portability and avoids dependencies on any single cloud provider.
Keep reading to learn more about the characteristics of cloud agnostic applications, the cloud native technologies that power them, and the features and benefits of a cloud agnostic approach to application development.
A note for our readers: At TierPoint, we sometimes use the term “cloud agnostic” to describe our comprehensive suite of IT consulting and data center services. In that sense, it means that we provide expert advice and data center services to our customers without any prior preference for a specific public cloud provider. In this blog, the term “cloud agnostic” refers to application development—and we’ll cover all the details of what cloud agnostic app development entails.
What Is Cloud Agnostic Application Development?
Cloud agnostic application development is an approach to software design, development, and deployment that intentionally avoids creating dependencies on any specific public cloud provider, vendor, or platform.
An application developed using a cloud agnostic approach can be deployed on any public or private cloud platform without requiring major changes or reconfiguration to its code.
Cloud agnostic application development allows organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and gives developer teams the flexibility to deploy their applications in any environment that suits their practical or business needs without having to navigate challenges around application portability and compatibility.
5 Elements of Cloud Agnostic Applications
As a starting point for understanding cloud agnostic application development, let’s begin with a look at five common elements associated with cloud agnostic applications.
1. Cloud Platform Independence
Cloud platform independence is the most important defining element of cloud agnostic applications. Cloud agnostic applications are intentionally designed such that they can be deployed and operated on any cloud platform, especially the major public clouds Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
To achieve cloud platform independence, developers of cloud agnostic applications must avoid creating application dependencies on any services that are unique or specific to any one cloud platform.
2. Containerization
Containerization is a software development and deployment methodology where application code is packaged together with the required operating system libraries, configuration files, and other dependencies required to execute the code.
This packaging creates a single lightweight executable called a container that can be deployed on any infrastructure and is compatible with all public clouds. Containerization technology has become increasingly common since the 2013 release of Docker, the most popular open-source containerization platform.
3. Microservice Architecture
The earliest software applications followed what we now call a monolithic architecture, where the entire application is built as a single self-contained unit separate from other applications.
But in the cloud computing era, the most advanced developer teams build cloud agnostic applications using a microservice architecture, where the application consists of a collection of lightweight and independently deployable services that communicate with each other via APIs.
Microservice architecture makes it faster and easier for developer teams to build, update, deploy, manage, and scale each service as needed without affecting the others. A microservice architecture also gives organizations the flexibility to run applications by deploying microservices across multiple cloud providers when it makes sense to optimize cloud costs and performance.
4. Open-Source Tools
Public cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide a huge number of proprietary tools that developers can use to build applications that run on their platforms.
However, a cloud agnostic approach to application development requires that developers avoid lock-in by implementing viable alternatives to these platform-specific tools and services. For this reason, cloud agnostic developers frequently utilize open-source software tools that are freely available to the public, highly customizable, and can be integrated into containerized applications to enable their deployment across multiple cloud environments.
5. Cloud-Neutral Monitoring and Security
Developers use application monitoring and security tools to continuously monitor the health, performance, and security status of their applications. When it comes to cloud agnostic applications, developers must implement cloud agnostic application monitoring and security solutions that are compatible across multiple platforms. This allows developers to achieve a unified view of application health, performance, and security without depending on tools or services from any one cloud provider.
Cloud Agnostic vs. Cloud Native App Development: What’s the Difference?
Cloud native application development is the software development approach of building, deploying, and managing applications for specific cloud computing environments.
Cloud agnostic application development is the approach of building, deploying, and managing portable applications that are compatible with multiple cloud computing environments and not dependent on any one cloud environment.
All cloud agnostic applications are designed, deployed, and managed on cloud computing platforms, which makes them cloud native applications by definition.
However, not all cloud native applications can be considered cloud agnostic. Many cloud native applications are built with dependencies on specific tools, applications, or services that are unique/proprietary to the cloud platform for which they were designed. These cloud native applications cannot be considered cloud agnostic because they would require significant redesign or reconfiguration to function on another cloud platform.
7 Technologies That Support Cloud Agnostic App Development
To effectively build, deploy, and operate cloud agnostic applications, developers need software tools and technologies that can enable application portability and support flexible deployment across multiple environments. Below, we highlight seven technologies that enable developers to build portable and scalable cloud agnostic applications.
1. Containerization
As mentioned above, containerization is one of the most important modern technologies used to develop cloud agnostic applications. Containerization allows developer teams to package application code along with all necessary dependencies in a single executable file, enabling easy deployment and consistent performance across multiple public cloud platforms.
Open-source Docker is the most popular containerization solution for cloud agnostic app development, with an estimated 82.5% market share.
2. Container Orchestration
While containerization solutions like Docker are used to create and package containers, container orchestration platforms make it easier for developer teams to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across multiple public cloud providers and/or on-premise IT environments.
There are several different container orchestration solutions available, but Kubernetes is by far the most popular container orchestration platform with an estimated market share of more than 92%.
3. Multi-Cloud Infrastructure-as-Code
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is a category of software tools that allow developer teams to define infrastructure needs for cloud agnostic applications and streamline the process of provisioning compute, storage, memory, and other cloud resources in a repeatable way across multiple cloud providers.
Major public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) have their own proprietary IaC tools, but cloud agnostic developers tend to prefer established open-source alternatives like Pulumi or Terraform.
4. Multi-Cloud Management Platforms
Multi-cloud management platforms provide a unified interface for connecting, managing, and securing microservice-based applications across multiple on-prem and cloud environments. This technology can give developers the ability to automate service discovery, visualize network connections between services across multiple environments, and efficiently authenticate, authorize, and even encrypt communication between the microservices that comprise a cloud agnostic application.
Hashicorp Consul and Red Hat OpenShift are both examples of open-source software solutions with multi-cloud management capabilities.
5. Open-Source DBs
Each public cloud vendor offers multiple proprietary database services that can be integrated into cloud native applications, such as Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) or Google Cloud SQL.
But when it comes to building cloud agnostic applications, developers prefer open-source database tools like PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Apache Cassandra that can be deployed across multiple on-prem and cloud environments without the risk of vendor lock-in.
6. Open-Source Platform-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a cloud-based application development and deployment environment that allows developers to build, deploy, and manage applications in the cloud without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
Proprietary PaaS solutions like Google App Engine, Azure App Service, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk can lead to vendor lock-in, so developers of cloud agnostic applications prefer open-source alternatives like Dokku or Cloud Foundry that can be deployed across multiple on-prem and cloud environments.
7. Monitoring and Observability
Developers rely on monitoring and observability tools for several important use cases, including application performance monitoring, user behavior analysis, security threat hunting, cloud service troubleshooting, and more.
Public clouds offer proprietary monitoring and observability tools to support these use cases, but cloud agnostic developers who wish to avoid vendor lock-in will need to implement either a 3rd-party observability platform like Datadog, and/or an open-source solution like Prometheus or ELK Stack.
What Are the Benefits of Cloud Agnostic App Development?
1. Increasing Application Portability and Flexibility
A cloud agnostic approach to development ensures that applications are portable across multiple on-prem or cloud environments. This gives organizations the flexibility to deploy applications in the optimal computing environments based on geographical considerations, compliance requirements, or operational/business needs.
2. Enabling Data Resilience and Disaster Recovery
Cloud agnostic application development enables a higher level of data resiliency and disaster recovery. If one cloud provider experiences an outage, an organization can easily shift its application workloads to another provider with no service interruption or lost uptime.
3. Optimizing Cloud Costs
Public cloud providers offer different pricing models and costing for cloud infrastructure and services. Organizations following a cloud agnostic approach gain the ability to choose or switch between multiple cloud providers to access favorable pricing, claim discounts, and optimize/reduce their overall cloud costs.
4. Enhancing Application Performance
With a cloud agnostic approach, organizations can enhance application performance by hosting applications in data centers that are closer to customers or by choosing hosting platforms that offer the best connectivity, lowest latency, and best overall experience for the end user.
5. Avoiding Vendor Lock-in
A cloud agnostic approach helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in, giving them the freedom and flexibility to shift their workloads between multiple on-prem and cloud environments without being tied to proprietary services, databases, or other solutions.
Build Your Next Cloud Agnostic Application with TierPoint
TierPoint provides a comprehensive suite of managed public cloud services to support our customers at every stage of cloud adoption and maturity.
Whether you’re migrating legacy applications to the cloud or building modern applications for your complex hybrid or multi-cloud environment, TierPoint can help you implement the right technologies and best practices to support cloud native or cloud agnostic application development, choose the right public cloud environments to fit your workloads, and maximize the value of your public cloud investments.
Book an intro call with us to learn more about how TierPoint can support your application modernization efforts and guide you through the process of building portable and flexible cloud agnostic applications.
