3 Multi-cloud Motivations
Multi-cloud for flexibility, sovereign cloud, and because it’s there. Also, Software Defined Talk from KubeCon EU, & some links.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming blog series analyzing our 2023 State of Kubernetes survey.
Multi-cloud for flexibility, sovereign cloud, and because it’s just there
This year, our survey found several motivators for doing multi-cloud. Let's look at some of them plus some that I hear about a lot that aren't in the chart.
Flexibility
"Lock-in" is always a touchy subject. You've got two camps. On the one hand, why not go with just one cloud to get both the best of breed and also the benefits of a single-source, integrated stack. On the other hand, you have the fear of getting stuck on that single-source, potentially suffering from both innovation slowdown and price-hikes. Diversifying your IT portfolio is a long tradition to avoid both of those and, instead, get access to the best-fit functionality for multiple sources and give yourself leverage and escape routes when you want to seek more affordable tech.
Sovereign Cloud
Almost half the respondents (48%) to IDC’s Cloud Pulse 2Q22 survey (n=1350) say that data sovereignty and industry compliance have factored highly in discussions about their future IT architectures. And just 4% of respondents believe their IT organizations will not be impacted by data sovereignty and compliance considerations. IDC, January 2023.
Very few organizations can operate free of sovereign cloud requirements, if not just jurisdictional desires. The American bias of technology and cloud obscures this because the major cloud providers are all American, so American companies (who tend to be very vocal in the overall industry) have little issue using those clouds.
There is, however, as us expats have discovered, the rest of the world.
Just like American companies, they'd probably prefer to have their compute in their own regions, under their own legal systems and financial regulations. As a thought exercise, imagine that there's great, affordable clouds running in another country, say the fictional Zubrowka: would you feel comfortable running your Global 2,000 enterprise systems in just that country, following its regulations and subject to its laws? While the hotel stays would be divine, and skiing exquisite, you might suddenly get very interested in sovereign cloud.
It Exists
"It's what we have" is a solid reason to use a multi-cloud strategy. This is simply the current state of most large organizations. There are two sources of a diverse IT estate. First, years of loosely-gardened IT strategy that favored business unit autonomy and speed over centralization and standardization. Second, a steady stream of acquisitions that bring entire other IT estates into the organization. Think of rental car agencies buying each other or just regional companies, banks buying other banks to stabilize the financial system, or just your regular large company expanding its business by buying a small, innovative company.
Check out more details in the survey. Also, we’ve got two webinars detailing the survey coming up: one on June 1st at a US friendly time and one on June 7th at a Europe friendly time. Register for which ever one you like: you can at least catch the recording, if not live.
Software Defined Talk at KubeCon
Thanks to Dell, we recorded a Software Defined Talk episode at KubeCon, about KubeCon. In addition to Matt and my, it has frequent guest co-host Barton George.
Take a listen: Matt, Coté and guest host Barton George record live from KubeCon EU. They discuss the Keynotes, Amsterdam grocery stores, A.I. coverage by tech media and reminisce about OpenStack. Plus, some thoughts on the Breakfast Buffet…
Relevant to your interests
Too Big to Challenge? - “How much of the computer science panic of an AI robot takeover is actually coming from an anxiety that their status, power, and wealth is under threat?”
KubeCon EU + CloudNativeCon 2023 Summary - pretty good. And thorough.
Logoff
I just finished editing a great interview with one of my co-workers about modernizing a mainframe application which I’ll highlight more in the next episode. I wanted interviewed Foaud after reading his blog post on this topic. I don’t like writing podcast and video descriptions, so I thought I’d ask the old ChatGPT4 to do it. I pasted in the blog post content and asked it to write a podcast description for it. With a little bit of work to de-hyperbolize it, the output was great, actually.
I’ve hit the character limit with ChatGPT for many of the things I’d like to do. I need someway to slice up larger text and feed it piecemeal. I mean, obviously I just need to ask it to write me a script to do that.
Suggested Outro: