{"id":5102,"date":"2020-06-26T18:03:30","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T18:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=5102"},"modified":"2020-06-26T21:53:22","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T21:53:22","slug":"the-coming-smokestack-rethinking-and-retooling-multi-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/the-coming-smokestack-rethinking-and-retooling-multi-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"The coming SMOKEstack: rethinking and retooling \u201cmulti-cloud\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"smokestack<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the past 10 years or so as AWS has continued to grow and dominate new markets we\u2019ve seen a couple of key narratives emerge that might be seen as either realism, or perhaps just an attempt to slow Amazon down. One is hybrid-cloud, and the other is multi-cloud.<\/p>\n

Consultants and folks invested in legacy technology stacks find hybrid cloud appealing for obvious reasons. Hybrid cloud means enterprises doing much what they do now, but with a promise of Cloud portability for data and application workloads. Keep doing what you\u2019re doing, but with some public cloud now and more in future. Hybrid cloud is a bit of a punt. One reason Kubernetes is so popular is that it can be made to fit this narrative: you can be cloud native, and on prem, a dessert and a floorwax. With all their legitimate, significant, investments in Kubernetes, meeting genuine customer demand, VMware Tanzu and Red Hat Open Shift are best placed to play the hybrid cloud game.<\/p>\n

But what of multi-cloud? One way of looking at multi-cloud is with a similar view of portability. Find a technology that will allow us to build applications to deploy to any public cloud and go from there. Investment protection, transferable skills, write once run anywhere- what\u2019s not to like? Again Kubernetes fits the bill nicely here. Learn and invest in Kubernetes and then an organization should be able to write applications and deploy them to any cloud they choose. Amazon EKS, Google Cloud GKS, Azure AKS. Hey look folks *KS – they\u2019re all the same, right? Of course the devil is always in the detail, in manageability, in slight points of friction and different approaches. Back in the day Unix made similar promises. While the public cloud Kubernetes services share some similarities, there are also plenty of differences – consider for example AWS Fargate – a managed \u201cserverless\u201d Kubernetes platform. Manageability is always a great point of lock in over time. All that said, portability is always a matter of degree, and certainly Kubernetes offers some comfort factors for customers that portability is there if they need it. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a risk management organization, and enterprises and cloud companies alike continue to push Cloud vendors to support Kubernetes and related CNCF stack technologies.<\/p>\n

While managed services is one form of lock in another powerful lever is egress charges. Once you\u2019re running on AWS you\u2019re not going anywhere else because egress costs are eye-wateringly high. And why would you want to get off AWS? It\u2019s a powerful platform, one of the most incredible engineering organisations in history, with an absurdly rapid cadence of new functionality in all of the most important areas. It may not be be the slickest experiences, but the primitives are incredibly powerful and the documentation does the job.<\/p>\n

There is another view of mult-cloud however, which the industry hasn\u2019t really given a name yet. In this view of the world organisations will use different clouds for different jobs. Different parts of the same organisation are going to make different choices. Mergers and acquisition activity are almost certainly going to render any single vendor cloud strategy moot over a reasonable time frame. And different clouds are frankly really good at different things. AWS primitives are excellent, but if you want to bet on a platform for its data services the natural choice is GCP. Spanner, BigTable, BigQuery, PubSub, is a powerful, well integrated platform from Google. Azure continues to make great strides in key areas, and Microsoft is beginning to make the GitHub advantage count. GitHub will become a dominant player in DevOps and CI\/CD over time, and Microsoft\u2019s focus on Developer Experience is unmatched by its competitors. Visual Studio Code is everyone\u2019s favourite editor. CodeSpaces is going to make everything easier. Azure has some great IoT tools. Every cloud platform has its strengths.These strengths will be leveraged. Any major organisation is going to be using at least two of the major cloud platforms, but not for portability reasons, just because that\u2019s the nature of tools choices.<\/p>\n

And then there are the services. Oh all the lovely highly productive services. If you like the public cloud services just wait til you meet best of breed APIs. Oh my goodness Stripe for payment is just the thing- the docs are dreamy and the APIs are lovely too. Algolia for text search. Auth0 does cross platform authentication management so well, why not use it across your app portfolio? Oh you have image and video assets to manage – Cloudinary jumps out as a highly productive service choice. You want your app to have messaging – Twilio\u2019s got you. Oh managed content management yes you want Contentful for that. Managed customer data with an API and you\u2019re not looking to use Salesforce? See Segment, it\u2019s on point.<\/p>\n