Kurt Haberkamp, VP of customer success at MariaDB, delves into the intricacies of single and multi cloud strategies, emphasizing the importance of aligning technology choices with business and customer needs.
Many enterprises now have multi cloud strategies, while others cling to a single provider. Having more than one cloud provider reduces some risks, like uptime for time sensitive transactions, but it also introduces other risks that IT must understand.
Having a single cloud provider is relatively simple because there’s only one vendor’s roadmap and idiosyncrasies to worry about, but ultimately, that translates to a less flexible cloud stance. Depending on the nature and size of a business, one has to weigh the benefits and risks of having a multi cloud strategy.
Why Multi cloud Implementations Are Complex
Adding more cloud providers results in greater complexity because each has its own configuration, features, networking, and security approach. Understanding all that requires a range of skills that don’t exist in a single cloud environment. Cloud vendors also have different upgrade schedules and policies about Kubernetes version control. All those differences need to be tracked.
In addition, each cloud categorizes resources to change resource availability, so if you want a certain class of compute, it’s called one thing on AWS and another on Azure or another public cloud. Similarly, the compute is configured differently depending on the vendor, and pricing varies. Cloud providers also have different naming conventions. Then, there are customer facing issues that add yet more complexity.
While there are many standards focused on the build aspect of development, there are far fewer that address deployment. For example, there’s no standard for Kubernetes orchestration, which is problematic for organizations with multi cloud deployments running applications at scale and under stress. There will likely never be a single Kubernetes orchestration standard because Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat are all optimizing it for business purposes.
Meanwhile, there are shrinking IT resources, even though small degrees of separation can wreak havoc. That means IT must understand all the differences if multiple app versions need to be deployed across multiple.