The most obvious challenge is network connectivity, especially if remote cloud services like a public cloud or a hosted private cloud are involved. Not only must bandwidth, latency, reliability and associated cost considerations be taken into account, but also the logical network topology must be carefully designed.

Another huge challenge is the manageability of different cloud services. When different cloud services are used, every service provider will have its own management and provisioning environment. Those environments can be considered completely independent from each other.

By having instances in different cloud services, there is no complete picture available showing the number of totally deployed instances and their statuses. An orchestration layer can be a possible solution for this problem. This layer provides a single interface for all cloud-related tasks.

he orchestration layer itself communicates with the different cloud services through application programming interfaces (APIs). The big advantage of an orchestration layer is the ability to track and control activities on a central point to maintain the big picture.

Web servers/ app servers

In-memory analytics

Disaster Recovery

Media streaming apps

Batch processing apps

Enterprise apps

NoSQL stores

Network appliances

Test and dev environments