Beyond Multi-Cloud: Achieving True Infrastructure Agility with OpenShift

Infrastructure agility isn't just about having presence in multiple clouds. It's about the ability to move workloads seamlessly between environments with minimal friction, reconfiguration, or retraining of staff.

Many organizations mistake having accounts with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud as achieving "multi-cloud agility." But this approach creates knowledge silos, inconsistent security models, and makes workload portability nearly impossible without extensive rearchitecting. When each environment demands its own specialized expertise, security configurations, and service mappings, you're not gaining agility—you're accumulating technical debt.

With Red Hat OpenShift, infrastructure agility becomes a reality through abstraction, standardization, and true portability. Let's explore how OpenShift transforms multi-cloud from a management headache into a strategic advantage.

Beyond Provider Diversity: The Knowledge Challenge

The first major challenge with traditional multi-cloud approaches is the knowledge gap. Each provider has its own:

• Unique terminology and service naming
• Security frameworks and IAM models
• Networking configurations and policies
• Automation tooling and deployment patterns

When your team needs specialized expertise for each environment, you're not just paying for multiple clouds—you're paying for multiple learning curves, certifications, and potential mistakes during the adaptation process.

OpenShift dramatically reduces this burden by providing a consistent layer that minimizes how much you interact with native cloud services. Instead of using Lambda in AWS, RDS for databases, and Azure Functions in Microsoft's cloud, you deploy standardized workloads through OpenShift:

• Use Knative serving instead of proprietary serverless offerings
• Deploy containerized databases rather than provider-specific managed services
• Implement consistent security policies through OpenShift rather than juggling multiple IAM frameworks

Your team becomes experts in one platform—OpenShift—rather than three or four different cloud ecosystems. This consolidation of knowledge dramatically reduces training costs and accelerates your ability to execute across environments.

Workload Portability: Eliminate Rearchitecting Between Clouds

The second critical advantage is true workload portability. Moving applications between cloud providers in traditional models is exceptionally challenging:

Traditional Multi-Cloud Approach:

1. Export data from origin provider services
2. Identify equivalent services in target provider
3. Translate all configurations, security policies, and connection strings
4. Rewrite application components that use provider-specific services
5. Rearchitect deployment and CI/CD pipelines
6. Retrain operations teams on new environment

This becomes an expensive, time-consuming migration project with high risk—not the seamless movement that true agility demands.

OpenShift Approach:

1. Use OpenShift's Installation Program for Infrastructure (IPI) installer to provision clusters consistently across providers
2. Leverage container-native storage with synchronous replication between environments
3. Deploy identical containerized workloads and operators in each cluster
4. Redirect traffic with simple DNS or load balancer adjustments

With OpenShift, your applications aren't built for AWS or Azure—they're built for OpenShift, which happens to run on your chosen infrastructure. This distinction is critical for achieving true portability.

Implementing Infrastructure Agility with OpenShift

1. Standardize on OpenShift-Native Services

The first step toward infrastructure agility is standardizing on OpenShift-native services rather than leveraging provider-specific offerings:

• Replace AWS Lambda with Knative serving
• Use containerized database services instead of RDS or CosmosDB
• Implement service mesh capabilities through Istio rather than proprietary tools

This approach ensures your application's dependencies remain portable alongside your containerized workloads.

2. Implement Cross-Environment Data Synchronization

The most challenging aspect of infrastructure mobility is data synchronization. OpenShift enables multiple approaches:

• Synchronous replication for critical data with strict consistency requirements
• Scheduled replication using container-native storage solutions
• Event-driven data pipelines for eventual consistency models

By establishing ongoing data synchronization between environments, you can achieve near-instantaneous failover capabilities without data loss.

3. Automate Cluster Provisioning and Configuration

OpenShift's installation tools automate the creation of correctly configured clusters across providers:

• Use IPI installer for automated cloud provisioning
• Implement GitOps practices with ArgoCD for consistent configuration
• Deploy standard operators across all environments

With consistent automation, your team can provision new environments in hours rather than weeks, dramatically accelerating your ability to respond to changing requirements.

Tooling That Supports True Infrastructure Agility

Several tools complement OpenShift to create a truly agile infrastructure:

• Red Hat Ansible: Automate environment provisioning and configuration management at scale
• Container-Native Storage Solutions: Provide data replication and mobility between environments
• ArgoCD and Other GitOps Tools: Enable declarative configuration across all clusters
• Observability Solutions: Offer unified monitoring across environments to enable data-driven decisions

When combined with OpenShift, these tools create a comprehensive platform for infrastructure mobility that far exceeds the capabilities of traditional multi-cloud approaches.

Where Can This Infrastructure Agility Take You?

Let's say you've implemented OpenShift across multiple environments with synchronized data and standardized services. What becomes possible?

• Cost Optimization: Dynamically shift workloads to the provider with the most favorable pricing based on actual utilization
• Disaster Recovery: Achieve recovery time objectives measured in minutes rather than days by automating failover between environments
• Provider Negotiation: Gain significant leverage in provider contract negotiations when your workloads are truly portable
• Geographic Expansion: Rapidly expand into new regions by leveraging different providers' geographic footprints without application rearchitecting

The agility provided by OpenShift doesn't just reduce operational overhead—it unlocks strategic possibilities that provide lasting competitive advantages.

When you adopt OpenShift as your foundation for infrastructure agility, you're not just solving the multi-cloud challenge—you're building a platform for technological resilience that will continue to deliver value as both your requirements and the market evolve.