Multi-Cloud will become the next Cloud.

door 8 oktober 2016

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Why use one cloud, when you can use any Cloud? Let’s think about what has happened over the last few years in public Cloud computing and the hyper­visor wars on-premises.
VMware has largely dominated the data center, but we are seeing a strong push from Microsoft on the hyper­visor front. KVM and Xen continue to grow in popu­la­rity for certain sectors, and all across the spectrum we see lots of people running more than one hyper­visor. Within Cloud computing there is no diffe­rents. The real shift in the IT industry is the broad accep­tance of multiple platforms inside every IT portfolio. And now we jumped right past the Cloud to the next level and it is called multi-Cloud.

Why Run More Than One Cloud?

Tech­no­logy is not the problem, it’s the solution.  Business chal­lenges are being answered by tech­no­logy which is what really matters.  So, why would we run more than one cloud?  The reason is a tech­no­lo­gical one usually. Certain features, APIs, and archi­tec­tures may be supported on one more than another. There are raw economics involved as well. There are overall avai­la­bi­lity concerns which drive busi­nesses to disperse their IT across multiple data­cen­ters, so why not do the same in the cloud?
The reason that AWS and OpenStack are often pitted against each other is that there are capa­bi­li­ties to enable AWS API access within the OpenStack platform. The reason that it becomes important is that we see a big adoption of AWS, and being able to take the same workloads and move them to OpenStack using the same API calls and inter­ac­tions would be a massive win for OpenStack as a platform.

If we stick to strictly public Cloud providers, we can start with what we would call the Big 3: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform. Among those three, we see a lot of parrying as we see features and pricing updates happening regularly. That results in an ever-growing set of services that can be easily consumed. As we see common orches­tra­tion and opera­ti­onal platforms gaining in popu­la­rity, it gives even more credence to the commo­di­ti­za­tion of Cloud.

Reducing the Complexity of Multi-Cloud

Complexity is the one thing that will slow the multi-Cloud adoption a bit longer. There are clearly different ways to consume resources, and to program­ma­ti­cally create and destroy resources in the public cloud platforms. Espe­ci­ally when you go outside of the Big 3. That means consumers of the public Cloud will have to start with one target and generally work up to a deep comfort there before moving to embrace a multi-Cloud strategy.

Once we remove or reduce complexity from the list of barriers, that opens up the door for embracing the economic value of a multi-cloud strategy. This is where we can embrace on-demand growth to tackle scaling needs, while making the workload truly portable and making sure that flexe­bil­lity becomes the real win. Networ­king and security (they should always be paired) will most likely be the greatest challenge that tech­no­lo­gists face in archi­tec­ting their single multi-cloud solutions.
Next-Gene­ra­tion appli­ca­tions are being built as Cloud-native where possible. What we do gain by embracing the Cloud-native approach to appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment and deploy­ment is that we reduce the risk of vendor lock-in. The more we learn from the forward-leaning devel­op­ment teams, the more we are able to give ourselves agility in a multi-Cloud archi­tec­ture. As all of the public Cloud experts are arguing over who will be the last one to be all-in on the public Cloud running cloud-native appli­ca­tions, multi-Cloud strategy will certainly gain intrest from a broader audience of companies who are looking for reducing the risks by putting all the eggs into one public Cloud basket.
Author: Eric Wright

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