Enterprise SaaS Workloads on New-Generation Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) on Multi-Cloud Platforms

Abstract

Cloud Computing has become the primary model used by DevOps practitioners and researchers to provision infrastructure in minimal time. But recently, the traditional method of using a single cloud provider has fallen out of favor due to several limitations regarding performance, compliance rules, geographical reach, and vendor lock-in. To address these issues, industry and academia are implementing multiple clouds (i.e., multi-cloud). However, managing the infrastructure provisioning of enterprise SaaS applications faces several challenges, such as configuration drift and the heterogeneity of cloud providers. This has seen Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) technologies being used to automate the deployment of SaaS applications. IaC facilitates the rapid deployment of new versions of application infrastructures without degrading quality or stability. Therefore, this work presents a vision of uniformly managing the infrastructure provisioning of enterprise SaaS applications that utilize multiple cloud providers. Hence, we introduce an initial design for the IaC-based Multi-Cloud Deployment pattern and discuss how it addresses the relative challenges.