Continuing my thoughts on multi-cloud strategy, I thought I would do a writeup on some of the key features and functionality that I came across within AWS that can be leveraged for a multi-cloud environment/strategies. But first, some rants on Corey's blog here: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/multi-cloud-is-the-worst-practice/ and Ben Kehoe (https://twitter.com/ben11kehoe/status/1266085955070500864).
Anyone, who has worked in a large enterprise, can simply reject these statements from the two gentlemen above because the person knows for a fact that:
- Large org grows with acquisition too: Hence all possibility of multi-cloud.
- Did someone say compliance?
- Start development on AWS but what if you get significant discounts on placing Microsoft workload on Azure because of the EA. Or what if you have a data scientist team who tried and tested relevant GCP services.
I like the blog https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/aws-hearts-multi-cloud-its-gonna?opt_id=undefined from
Forrest Brazeal who summed it up very nicely and practically.
Researching on some of the AWS services that can be leveraged with "multi-cloud environment", I found them scattered across the following categories:
- Compute: Amazon Kubernetes Service and EKS anywhere (To be released in 2021). Within serverless compute, unless your software is carefully crafted and you program through best practices (like interfaces, Open-Close principles) etc, you are coupled with the Lambda service.
- Data Store: Elasticache and ElasticSearch for open source caching and searching respectively. Your applications could be written against Memcached/Redis but underlying infrastructure could be running within any cloud. Same goes with RDS services like Aurora for MySQL and PG, RDS MySQL/PG, and other enterprise databases.
- Networking: Aside from the VPN setup, there is nothing much thats in place. Afterall, the CSPs have their own set of network infrastructure. There are certainly partners who can assist here.
The way I see it, organizations need to protect, manage, enhance their business process and data. They must have organization policies/principles/SLA and regulations around it. Where their business services run should be secondary (supporting the business services). Because at the end of the day, whichever provider you choose for a specific workload or service, to a large extent you are already locked into the providers' technologies such as serverless function, monitoring capability, identity and authorization capabilities, networking, account and billing structures, etc. There is certainly no "cloud neutral" way around these aspects. You can possibly take help of the partners but I doubt even they are "true multicloud".
Top comments (0)