How Heavy is Multi-Cloud?
Is multi-cloud the steak of enterprise IT?
If, at home, you perfected cooking an Impossible Steak and you wanted to bring that process to multiple restaurants, would each restaurant have what you needed? For example, let’s say you had a unique refrigeration process for marinating the Impossible Steak. Would you then have to bring your refrigeration to each restaurant? Or would you adjust your technique to each locale?
Is multicloud the same as taking all of your utensils, cooking gear, and ingredients from one place to another? Or is it just taking your recipes and processes and using what's available at each location? #CTODose
A Cloud Architect friend brought this scenario to me in a discussion about multi-cloud for workload portability. Are we diluting our successful recipe/processes to enjoy the benefits of multi-cloud?
Great question and analogy. However, the context for taking the steak to the restaurant needs to be defined.
Was the steak taken there as a new unique steak (application) or was it copied or pulled from an existing cloud environment and reinstantiated.
As a net new application to any cloud the burden of build and productionalizing it are the same, with the exception of potential staff knowledge.
If you’re attempting to run a single application across multiple clouds or extract an exiting app from one cloud and put it in another, then the anology is more apropos.
Generally speaking people don’t run one app across different cloud providers so the issue described is uncommon. Moving an app from a private cloud or from one CSP to another is slightly more common and again, the original analogy applies.