When I speak to large-scale AWS customers about their challenges and concerns, the conversation often turns to multi-cloud. Whether by intent or by accident, these customers sometimes use services from multiple cloud providers, sometimes in conjunction with applications or services. Sometimes, they made early, bottom-up choices at the team and division level, choosing cloud offerings from multiple vendors without a top-down mandate. In others, they acquired or merged with another organization and discovered a similar multi-vendor situation.
Regardless of the path, these customers tell me they want to simplify and centralize their oversight and management of this diverse cloud and on-premises resources. At AWS, we understand and support this diversity, whether it’s a time-bound ‘multi’ situation with a consolidation plan or a long-term strategy to retain a diverse portfolio.
At AWS, our approach to multi-cloud is designed to empower you, no matter your architectural choices. In this post, I aim to outline our approach, share some capabilities that our customers have been using over the years, and provide you with an update on some of the more recent service announcements and content we have created to give you guidance that will help you succeed.
Our approach is to extend existing AWS operational and management capabilities to work in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Because we extend existing capabilities, your training, development, and scripting investment is preserved and becomes even more worthwhile since it applies to your other (non-AWS) resources. For example, you can use the same service (AWS Systems Manager) to patch and update Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, servers running on-premises, and servers provided by other cloud providers.
Similarly, you can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor applications, compute resources, and other cloud resources in those environments. These are two examples of how we are implementing our approach.
The AWS Solutions for Hybrid and Multicloud page contains additional examples of our extension-based approach to adding new capabilities. It also includes inspiring success stories from customers who have used the capabilities, such as Phillips 66 and Deutsche Börse. Their success is a testament to the power of our approach.
Just as we recently launched free data transfer to the internet (DTO) when you want to move outside of AWS, we are committed to helping you succeed regardless of your approach.
Multi-cloud launches
Since the beginning of 2023, we have launched eighteen new multi-cloud capabilities to existing AWS services, including 15 for data & analytics, 1 for security, and 2 for identity. Many of these launches add to the existing multi-cloud capabilities of the respective services:
AWS DataSync – This service transfers data between storage services. In addition to existing support for Google Cloud Storage, Azure Files, and Azure Blob Storage, we added support for five additional cloud service providers and storage services, including Oracle Cloud Storage and DigitalOcean Spaces. To learn more about this service, read What is AWS DataSync. To get started, I create a source location:
AWS Glue – This data integration service helps you discover, prepare, and integrate all your data at any scale. You can connect to more than 80 different data sources, including cloud databases and analytics services. In October 2023, we introduced new connectors allowing you to move data bidirectionally between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage. We also launched six database connectors for AWS Glue for Apache Spark, including Teradata, SAP HANA, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Vertica, and MongoDB (complete list). To learn more about AWS Glue, read What is AWS Glue. I create a visual job flow to get started:
Amazon Athena – This serverless analytics service lets you use interactive SQL queries to analyze petabyte-scale data where it lives (more than 25 external data sources, including other cloud data stores) without copying or transforming it. Last year, we added a new data source connector that allows you to query data in Google Cloud Storage. To learn more about Amazon Athena, read What is Amazon Athena.
Amazon AppFlow – You can take advantage of data and analytics in Google BigQuery using a connector available in Amazon AppFlow. To get started with Amazon AppFlow, I created a flow and configured a data source:
Amazon Security Lake – This service helps you to achieve a more complete, organization-wide view of your security posture. It centralizes security data from your AWS environments, SaaS providers, on-premises environments, and cloud sources (Azure and GCP) into a purpose-built data lake. It became generally available last year and now supports collecting and analyzing security data from sources that support the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) standard—more than 80 sources.
AWS Secrets Manager – This service centrally manages secrets such as database credentials and API keys. Secrets are securely encrypted and can be centrally audited, with support for replication to support disaster recovery and multi-region applications. Last year, we announced you can use AWS Secrets Manager to store and manage secrets on-premises or in multi-cloud workloads. To learn more, read What is AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)—The AWS IAM Identity Center now supports automated user provisioning from Google Workspace. The integration helps administrators simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar Google Workspace experiences for end users as they sign in.
Amazon CloudWatch – This service lets you query, visualize, and alarm on metrics of all sorts: application, AWS, on-premises, and multi-cloud. At re: Invent 2023, we added even more support for consolidating hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises metrics. This new feature allows you to select and configure connectors that pull data from Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, generic Prometheus, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, CSV files stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Microsoft Azure Monitor.
Multi-cloud content and guidance
Now that you know about our latest multi-cloud launches, let’s examine some of the blog posts and other content my colleagues have created.
First, some blog posts:
Next, some of the most popular multi-cloud videos from AWS re: Invent 2023:
And finally, be sure to bookmark the AWS Solutions for Hybrid and Multicloud page.