Multi-cloud - the view from the ground
Organisations are adopting multiple IaaS/PaaS providers for many different reasons
A multi-cloud strategy, by accident or design, is in place at more than half of the organisations polled by Computing earlier this month.
Among the 150 executives polled, all of whom were working in businesses that make some use of cloud infrastructure, 84 (56 per cent) said they make ‘significant use' of more than one cloud IaaS/PaaS provider, with the average number of external cloud providers per organisation being 2.3.
By far the most popular IaaS/PaaS vendors were Microsoft Azure (82 per cent of respondents reported using that service) and AWS (64 per cent), with IBM coming a distant third (12 per cent).
Which cloud provider(s) do you use for IaaS/PaaS?
The reasons for choosing more than one cloud provider were many and various. They include global operations meaning one provider is unable to cover all regions (12 per cent), multiple developer teams each having a favourite (12 per cent), new IT leaders insisting on clouds they are familiar with (9 per cent), and integrators or other partners making the decision (7 per cent).
But the main driver was "to avoid lock-in or over-dependence on one supplier" (31 per cent).
How did your use of more than one public cloud provider come about? Pick the closest answer
Worries about cloud vendor lock in appear to be rising. This month, 17 per cent said they are taking active measures to avoid cloud lock-in, compared with 9 per cent who said the same in a similar poll in January. Overall, 59 per cent see lock in as being of concern.
Do you see cloud vendor lock-in as a problem?
The most common cloud pairing was, of course, AWS + Azure. Interestingly, none of the ‘third clouds' was deployed on its own: every user of GCP, Oracle, IBM and others that we polled (in this admittedly small sample) deployed those cloud services alongside those of another provider or provider(s). Clearly, these players need to concentrate on their niches and making their services as interoperable as possible if they are to thrive in a multi-cloud world, which is precisely what they are doing.
So, adoption of more of than one cloud is commonplace, but multiplicity inevitably breeds complexity. More skills may have to be brought in, managing costs becomes harder, and so far at least moving data and applications cheaply and efficiently between vendors' clouds is no simple task.
Multi-cloud requires a lot of decision-making around what's become known as data gravity. Generally speaking, moving large datasets between clouds is a very expensive business and is thus a limiting factor to the flexibility of the multi-cloud concept.
When deciding which database should live where, function was the leading factor. An organisation might have its financials in AWS and its ERP in Azure, for example, or it may choose to cluster applications with similar data needs together in one cloud. Others pick the cloud according to the applications supported, and scalability needs were also an important consideration.
How do you decide which workloads / datasets should be in which cloud? Choose the three most important considerations
Nevertheless, despite the problems posed by data gravity, a surprisingly high 30 per cent of organisations said they actively manage data between cloud service providers (CSPs), which is the promise of 'true' multi-cloud, proffered by platform-agnostic cloud native container technologies.
Do you actively manage data between different cloud service providers' environments?
The picture, then, is of a pragmatic but piecemeal approach, picking the best cloud for the job out of two or three (or occasionally more) options. Wary of lock-in, and often using more than one provider for historical reasons, organisations are keen to diversify, but the difficulty of moving data and some applications means they tend to stay put. However, a significant number of respondents reported that they do actively manage data between clouds. Exactly what they are doing and how will be the topic of a future investigation.
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