In cloud computing, portability is the ability to seamlessly move applications, data, workloads, and services between different cloud computing environments — with minimal disruptions, compatibility issues, or configuration changes. Cloud portability enables IT teams to migrate cloud workloads from one cloud provider to another, or between various public cloud, private cloud, multicloud, and hybrid cloud environments. Cloud portability ensures that resources like virtual machines, containers, and data can be easily redeployed or replicated across different platforms and cloud vendors. This enables IT teams to prevent vendor lock-in and to optimize cost, localization, and performance for each workload.
Why is portability important?
For today’s enterprises, cloud computing delivers highly scalable, cost-effective computing power with faster throughput. With new architectures emerging from digital transformation, organizations now have access to a growing universe of cloud environments, services, and vendors. As a result, organizations run workloads on a highly diverse mashup of hybrid cloud environments and multicloud platforms.
To get the most value from cloud computing, IT teams need the ability to move data, applications, and workloads to different cloud infrastructure or cloud platforms. They may want to run highly sensitive workloads or store confidential customer data or employee personal data on a private cloud or in specific public cloud location, while taking advantage of extremely cost-effective public cloud storage for less sensitive data archives. However, as IT teams move assets between on-premises data centers and a variety of cloud service providers, the complexity of cloud migration can introduce risks, impact performance, add administrative burden, and lead to disruption when things break down. Focusing on portability avoids these adverse consequences and lets IT teams and enterprises get the most value from the cloud.
What is portability vs. interoperability?
While cloud interoperability and portability are often used interchangeably, they represent two very different things. Interoperability in cloud computing refers to the ability of an application or system to work seamlessly with other technologies or clouds/environments, enabling data functionality to be shared easily. Portability is the ability to move applications, data, and workloads between different cloud service providers and on-premises systems.
What are the types of portability?
There are several kinds of portability in cloud computing.
- Application portability is the ability to easily move applications between different cloud platforms or environments without introducing compatibility issues or requiring significant changes to an application’s code, architecture, or configuration.
- Data portability is the ability to transfer data between different cloud environments or service providers while maintaining integrity, consistency, and usability.
- Workload portability is the ability to migrate workloads like containers, virtual machines, or service functions between cloud environments or providers without disruptions to functionality or performance.
- Platform portability is the ability to move entire cloud platforms or components like operating systems, runtime environments, and middleware between clouds or cloud providers.
What are the benefits of portability in multicloud computing?
Portability plays a crucial role in enabling multicloud strategies and allowing organizations to leverage multiple cloud providers. With greater portability, organizations and IT teams can:
- Optimize performance: By selecting the ideal cloud environment, IT teams can ensure each workload has the optimal resources and security it requires.
- Increase flexibility: Portability enables IT teams to make changes at any time in the distribution of workloads across different cloud providers.
- Reduce costs: By dynamically shifting workloads to the most cost-effective cloud environments, portability helps organizations to reduce the cost of cloud computing.
- Improve redundancy and resiliency: Using multiple cloud environments reduces the risk of downtime or data loss due to provider-specific issues and outages.
- Mitigate risk: The ability to use multiple vendors reduces dependency on any one vendor and lowers the risk of service outages associated with vendor lock-in.
- Enhance compliance: Portability enables IT businesses to move data, applications, and workloads to cloud environments that comply with industry regulations and regional data protection laws.
- Optimize ROI: IT teams can move workloads to clouds that offer the most value for their cloud budget.
- Simplify scalability: When workloads are portable, IT teams can cost-effectively spin up compute resources on multiple platforms with predictable pricing, and spin them down when no longer needed.
- Increase developer productivity: Portability frees developers from restrictive and proprietary tools, allowing them to build whatever is needed with the best tools for each project.
- Improve disaster recovery and business continuity: By distributing workloads across multiple environments, IT teams can develop more robust disaster recovery and business continuity strategies to minimize impact of outages and disruptions.
- Promoting innovation: Cloud portability allows IT teams to take advantage of emerging cloud products and services that can help to accelerate time to market. It can also prepare you for next-gen architectures like edge native.
- Better customer experiences: Portability enables organizations to deliver more consistent and reliable services, improving customer experiences and satisfaction.
What’s the best way to achieve portability?
IT teams and organizations can adhere to several best practices to achieve portability.
- Adopt cloud native architectures: Cloud native architectures like microservices and containerization decouple applications from specific underlying infrastructure, allowing them to be more portable across different cloud environments. Cloud native applications are inherently more portable because of their modular structure and use of open standards.
- Leverage open standards and APIs: Using open standards for data formats, open source technologies, and well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs) facilitates portability across different cloud providers as well as interoperability of different systems.
- Utilize containerization: Container technologies like Kubernetes make applications portable across different environments.
- Implement automation and orchestration: Orchestration tools like OpenShift, HashiCorp, or Rancher help IT teams manage and automate the use of containerized applications.
- Deploy open source, cloud-agnostic tools and services: Cloud-agnostic platforms, services, and tools are designed to work seamlessly across multiple cloud environments, eliminating dependencies on specific cloud providers and making them easier to migrate.
- Invest in cloud skills and expertise: Focusing on developing internal skills and expertise in cloud technology ensures that IT teams will be proficient in managing and migrating workloads across various cloud environments.
Frequently Asked Questions
When organizations are locked into using the services of a single cloud provider, they lose the ability to optimize costs, mitigate risk, and maintain flexibility.
Providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud promote portability by providing a variety of tools and services for container orchestration and migration of apps and data to and from their platforms.
Why customers choose Akamai
Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence.
