Here are the top factors to stitch a winning multi-cloud strategy that delivers in 2022
Hello Friends,
I hope you are having a wonderful week.
We have been getting a lot of snow in the Chicago area and it has kept life busy & fun (and slushy). 🏂
This week I dive into slides and explore the multi-cloud strategy. We hear a lot about multi-cloud strategy, but what does it take to succeed with it? Is it a great strategy fraught with operational issues? Is there an approach for doing things right? Let us find out.
Even in 2015, AWS was growing at an impressive QoQ rate.
This trend has continued since then. AWS is the clear leader globally in the Cloud Infrastructure space.
For Q4/2021, AWS could report $16 Billion in their Q4/2021 revenue, a solid growth of 39%.
Gartner's 2021 Magic quadrant report shows AWS miles ahead in AWS's ability to push the cloud infrastructure vision forward and strongly execute it.
But, the good news is- AWS is not growing alone.
The global share of the Public cloud is expanding too at an unprecedented pace.
If there was any potential slowdown, the pandemic only helped re-accelerate it.
SaaS, IaaS, BPaaS are all heading in the right direction.
The public cloud story is unfolding right in front of us.
My guess is we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
As massive adoptions take place in countries like India, Singapore, and entire Southeast Asia, these numbers are poised to go through the roof.
The evolution has also been taking various shapes and forms- including hybrid cloud and multi-cloud.
The easy availability of services has opened many new doors.
We are seeing Hybrid and multi-cloud becoming common across enterprises.
Top Cloud workloads are Databases, Analytics, and Web/content hosting.
Let us focus on multi-cloud scenarios and dissect them further.
Today, 75-85% of the enterprises in any survey are adopting a multi-cloud or a hybrid environment. They have multiple public, private, or a mix of these options for their infrastructure needs.
An average organization is reporting to be leveraging 2+ public cloud services.
CIOs embrace it because there are several strategic advantages to a multi-cloud strategy.
Advantages of Multi-cloud
Cost Benefits:
Services on the cloud have a complex cost structure- On-demand, Spot instances, Reserve instances. Then there are various tiers of services and associated costs.
Every vendor provides certain cloud credits for customer enablement.
Plus when you begin comparing services and project costs based on consumption at scale, there is a significant price.
Enterprises can leverage cost benefits by shopping across cloud providers.
For example, Comparing on-demand prices for running General Purpose instances for 1 hr, GCP comes out cheaper than Azure and AWS. When you compare GCP's Memory-optimized instance with those across Azure and AWS, GCP comes out to be exorbitantly expensive. (GCP's memory-optimized instance start at 40 vCPUs, it is not an apple to apple to comparison, but that is what GCP has)
When you compare 1-year Reserved Instances costs, Azure offers the deepest discounts on memory-optimized machines.
But AWS offers the best deal for 1-year Reserved Instance on compute Optimized Machines.
You can do this comparison in any other segment and see significant differences in costs. Cloud vendors enjoy pitting their services head to head in the market.
Enterprises must shop around and leverage the right cloud offering.
Chosing Best Capabilities based workloads
Every Cloud vendor brings a different depth in maturity and focus area.
AWS has an unparallel global reach. It offers 400+ instance types and is extremely deep in the compute category. It is also really strong in databases, analytics workloads. AWS is a developer's darling.
Azure is closest to enterprises for its deep roots in the office application space with Office 365, Teams, and fantastic support for Microsoft workloads.
GCP on the other hand has deep Machine learning capabilities, open-source tech like Kubernetes, and containerization technology.
Based on your industry and execution strategy, a few of the offerings may suit you better than the rest.
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Not Keeping all eggs in one basket
By leveraging multi-cloud, enterprises derisk their business and strategy.
They become resilient to outages which may affect their service providers.
In recent years massive outages have hit AWS, GCP, and others and disrupted our lives. These showed how our daily life is now interconnected with the cloud and these vendors have become too big to fail.
So, spreading workloads across the cloud enables organizations to create replicas of application, data, and compute tiers at various hyperscalers for failovers and resilience.
Leverage competition & avoiding lock-in
Multi-cloud enables enterprises to leverage competition in the market and avoid any vendor lock-in.
It helps keep the vendors in check for any sudden price revisions.
It is beneficial in case the vendor does not keep up with the growing needs of the market segment. Or, you simply want to take benefit of another vendor bringing out a more mature offering on the table.
Safer & Saner Corporate decision
It is an excellent strategic choice for a senior leader to showcase investments across cloud vendors.
It reduces risks, creates vendor competition, and looks like a perfect use case for driving shareholder value. It is a great corporate decision. There is a stronger narrative to go along with this decision when compared to going all-in on one service provider.
So, if there are so many great advantages, what are the issues.
Why is there a question mark in the title of this post?
Challenges or Cons of a multi-cloud strategy
Increase the complexity of everything
In a multi-cloud environment, everything becomes complex.
There is a learning curve with each vendor, the architecture becomes complex, the implementation becomes complex and the overall decision making becomes complex.
Multi-cloud is similar to buying a car, a helicopter, and a submarine. Each of these has its levels of complexity and level of learning.
You need to know what mode of transport should be used when. Across the top hyperscalers, there are hundreds of services each. Databases, services, features, compute options to firewalls, the list goes on and on.
On top of that, if you add cost considerations, it becomes a very complex decision and operational challenge.
Fantastic strategy, complex operations.
Skill & talent challenges
The biggest challenge on the market is skill availability today.
There is a demand-supply issue.
Most cloud specialists are sought after in the market. It makes it harder for smaller companies to get the right architects, DevOps & Cloud engineers. With a multi-cloud approach, taping the talent becomes another massive task.
Going complete in-house talent is not easy too. It can require significant upskilling and time investment before results are visible.
Security Management Painpoints, Access, Observability, Integrations, etc
Management of security is a huge pain point.
Even in a single cloud environment, the security & operations team needs to ensure the organization structure is set up, the right roles are set up, monitoring is enabled, right services are enabled, access is provided and data is securely onboarded storage.
In multi-cloud scenarios, all of those steps are to be repeated.
The security team's work increases in volume and complexity. Security management in multi-cloud scenarios relies deeply on well-trained staff, automated tools to implement security at scale. The downside of investing time to set up the right security can begin to create friction with project teams and timelines. These aspects can lead to teams taking on security debts while making decisions.
So how do we ensure that we build the multi-cloud strategy correctly:
In the end, I summarize by saying Multi-cloud is a great strategy but brings about too many operational challenges. Like all good things in life, execution is critical. Otherwise, the benefits which are deemed from using multiple cloud vendors could diminish quickly. Poor Implementations can increase the pain of those who were banking on Agility & security to catapult their organization across to the next transformation project.
Additional Reads
Cheers!
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