Multi-Cloud Is a Trap

It comes up in a lot of conversations with clients. We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in.

We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap. Outside of appeasing a few major retailers who might not be too keen on stuff running in Amazon data centers, I can think of few reasons why multi-cloud should be a priority for organizations of any scale.

A multi-cloud strategy looks great on paper, but it creates unneeded constraints and results in a wild-goose chase. For most, it ends up being a distraction, creating more problems than it solves and costing more money than it’s worth. I’m going to caveat that claim in just a bit because it’s a bold blanket statement, but bear with me.

For now, just know that when I say “multi-cloud,” I’m referring to the idea of running the same services across vendors or designing applications in a way that allows them to move between providers effortlessly. I’m not speaking to the notion of leveraging the best parts of each cloud provider or using higher-level, value-added services across vendors. Multi-cloud rears its head for a number of reasons, but they can largely be grouped into the following points: disaster recovery (DR), vendor lock-in, and pricing.

I’m going to speak to each of these and then discuss where multi-cloud actually does come into play.

Source: bravenewgeek.com