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Podcast on enterprise technologies including cloud native, GenAI, Security, Data Protection and more.
Hi. The this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to TFiR Let's Talk. Today we have with us once again Dave Birmingham, senior technical evangelist at SIOS Technology. Dave, it's great to have you on the show.
Dave Bermingham:Yeah. I'm glad to be back.
Swapnil Bhartiya:And today we are gonna talk about advantages and challenges of cloud to cloud failover for high availability. But before we deep dive into this topic, can you just talk a bit about what is cloud to cloud failover for high availability?
Dave Bermingham:Cloud to cloud failover involves, having multiple cloud providers and then having the ability to fail between 1 and the other in the event of an outage. It involves, data replication to ensure that the data is available on both clouds and also involves mechanisms to help with the failover of the cloud, resources as well as the client redirection to ensure con continuous availability.
Swapnil Bhartiya:What technical considerations are involved in planning a failover from one cloud to another and how do they impact overall system performance and reliability?
Dave Bermingham:Planning a a cloud cloud failover involves several technical considerations, including network latency, compatibility between cloud platforms, data replication, and synchronization. For example, you must ensure that data is continuously and efficiently replicated to the secondary cloud with minimal lag as any delay can impact recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. You also need to consider the failover mechanisms. Are they automated or manual? Automated failovers reduce the downtime, but require extensive testing to ensure ensure reliability.
Dave Bermingham:Compatibility between cloud environments is another key factor as discrepancies in configurations such as network topology, VM instance types, or storage classes can lead to performance degradation or a failure during a failover.
Swapnil Bhartiya:Why are organizations choosing to implement cross cloud failover strategies and what specific challenges do they hope to overcome with this approach?
Dave Bermingham:Organizations implement cross cloud failover strategies to enhance resilience against outages and avoid vendor lock in by distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers. Businesses can assure continuous operations even if one provider experiences a service disruption, such as those caused by regional outages or security incidents. Additionally, cross cloud strategies allow organizations to leverage the strength of each cloud provider such as cost efficiencies or unique services. However, this approach aims to overcome challenges like dependency on a single cloud infrastructure and the risk of widespread downtime.
Swapnil Bhartiya:And if possible, can you share some of these strategies, some of these approaches?
Dave Bermingham:Your cross cloud failover strategies are very much like hybrid cloud where you're, you know, on prem into cloud or cloud to on prem. It's just a matter of, leveraging the cloud infrastructure. So we talk about infrastructure as a service. It's very much like that hybrid cloud configuration we talked about. It's just standing up some instances in 1 cloud provider and and other instances and another cloud provider.
Dave Bermingham:And then implementing some sort of data replication, whether it's block level volume replication, like, you know, Cyrus Datakeeper Solutions or whether you're, you know, having some sort of replication that is application based like SQL Server, always on availability groups or simple log shipping. Those is that's the probably the most common failover mechanism. It's much more challenging when you start talking about cloud specific services. And so each one of those would have its own considerations, to make to ensure it could actually fill over between cloud providers.
Swapnil Bhartiya:Is failing over from 1 cloud provider to another always a feasible solution? Or there are scenarios where it introduces more complexity than benefits that it offers.
Dave Bermingham:Failing over from one cloud provider to another is not always feasible. It can introduce significant complexity if the 2 providers have vastly different architectures or service offerings. For instance, differences in network configurations, data handling policies, or compliance requirements can create challenges in achieving seamless failover. If workloads are tightly coupled to a specific cloud proprietary service, migrating those workloads during failover may require substantial reengineering. In such cases, the complexity and cost might outweigh the benefits, making other high availability strategies like multi region failover within the same provider more practical.
Swapnil Bhartiya:When does it make sense to use a multi cloud failover strategy for high availability and what are the key factors that organization should evaluate before making this decision?
Dave Bermingham:A multi cloud failover strategy makes sense when an organization requires ultra high availability and cannot tolerate reliance on a single cloud provider. Critical industries like finance or health care where downtime can have severe consequences are prime candidates. Some of the factors to evaluate include business continuity requirements. So what are your, recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, goals? Cost, is the additional cost of maintaining infrastructure across multiple clouds justifiable?
Dave Bermingham:Complexity, does the organization have expertise to manage those cross cloud failovers? Compliance, are there regulatory considerations that necessitate geographic or provider diversity? So careful analysis of those factors will help determine if multi cloud failover aligns with business goals.
Swapnil Bhartiya:What are some situations where a cloud to cloud failover strategy would not be advisable, and what are the native high ability methods could be more suitable in these cases?
Dave Bermingham:A cloud to cloud failover strategy might not be advisable when the application is tightly integrated with a specific cloud's proprietary service. Migrating workloads might cause significant disruptions. Cost constraints prevent maintaining duplicate environments across the clouds. That includes the cost associated with, transferring data out of the cloud into another. And finally, the organization lacks the expertise to manage the added complexity.
Dave Bermingham:So in these cases, alternate methods could include multi region failover within the same cloud provider, which is often simpler and more cost effective. But other approaches might include hybrid cloud solutions where critical data is mirrored to on premises infrastructure or active active configurations across zones within the same cloud to ensure resilience without cross cloud complexities.
Swapnil Bhartiya:Dave, thank you so much for joining me today and talk about cloud to cloud failover for high availability. You had great insights on the topic. Thank you so much, and I look forward to our next discussion. Thank you.
Dave Bermingham:Thanks. I'm glad to be here.