The myth of application mobility and multi cloud

 How easy is it to actually move applications in and out of the cloud, and between cloud offerings? In short, not very.

Pretty much every customer is chasing the dream of being cloud enabled, cloud first, cloud agnostic. But actually it’s almost impossible, at least not without an open chequebook and rafts of developers.

A high quality dev team can factor an application so it’s flexible, agile and portable. But typically that might take months, even for a single application. False starts, failed testing, weekly ‘go/no go’ calls, collective shouts of ‘we’re nearly there’ …. ‘next time’ ….. 

Every vendor has a cloud enabled and agile strategy, they’re all similar and they’re all totally different. Customers need to make some decisions around where to build the base foundation for multi cloud readiness:

·      Hypervisor layer

·      Data layer 

·      Container layer

Most vendors have a play of some sort in each of these areas, and most vendors are basing their hybrid cloud message around an Hyperconverged proposition. 

·      Most HCI propositions are built on VMware and integrate with VMware Cloud Foundation

·      Pretty much every rounded proposition in this space has a container based proposition, which is helpful considering most businesses are now doing at least something in this space, typically Kubernetes

·      And then there’s the question of additional capabilities. What else can a vendor offer above and beyond the infrastructure, hypervisor and container layer. How close can they really get to that public cloud like experience, but on premise

This latter point is probably seeing the most development from all vendors. This adds the most value to a customer in terms of their journey to achieving a more rounded multi cloud proposition. It also allows the customer to avoid the problem of their ‘legacy’ systems rotting in the corner while they still fund the business on a day to day basis.

So for now, based on what I’m seeing, customers are mostly deploying services in one location (be that AWS / Azure / GCP / MSP / On prem) because mobility is actually very hard to achieve. But it’s changing, and fast. 

Thanks for reading, 

Adam