What is Multi-Cloud & Why are Companies Adopting it?

[Music] so I think one thing that I feel like users and customers ask me all the time is like why should I bother with multi-cloud like it's one cloud is hard enough why don't I just like pick one pick Google and just get really good at Google and like why bother they're all kind of you know they have similar I as services and they're all kind of catching up on some of the higher level stuff yes there's some slight differences but like why bother with a multi cloud I feel like it's a common sentiment I think you actually gave a really good answer on why you know maybe you don't choose multi-cloud multi-cloud chooses you and yeah that's you know if you want to talk through that right yeah so I think the firt the the reason people jump to the most around multi cloud is vendor lock-in or price lock-in or something like that and what's funny is that's almost the least common reason people think about multi-cloud I think that's such an optimization that it's it's not the right thing to think about first is it's it's unrealistic practically the the better way to think about it is that especially the enterprise level most companies that are adopting cloud are moving from something they had before so if you had physical server something and so you're immediately in a multi or at least hybrid cloud environment and you call multi-cloud you call it hybrid cloud but the challenges you have are pretty much the same and so that's one of the reasons another reason is acquisitions so if the company decides to buy another company and you're on one cloud rider and the company you're buying is on another the company's not gonna cancel the acquisition by your multi cloud yeah exactly they they go to the central idea ops DevOps whatever the team is and say figure it out integrate this company indoors and then another reason is is pricing pressure I would say and so you do at a certain scale especially if you're an enterprise you're spending millions of dollars on cloud get credits or some sort of subsidy that pushes you one direction or another and again like a CFO or management if they see a free you know a couple million dollars that's it's pretty harder to say no to that they're gonna go to that team and say let's let's use this as best we can so you'll be stuck there and then the last reason really is just enable your teams to use best-of-breed services so at any given moment certain clouds have better AI services or better data better data processing or you know whatever it is and you want your teams you know working on those problems to be able to use the best tools possible and by saying you know you could only use this one cloud platform it's just so restrictive right so yeah the multi cloud will find you it chooses you yeah yeah and I think that last point I think around the differentiates or is I think does get underplate I think it's easy for sort of squint and look at a hundred thousand foot view and say yeah they kind of offer the same thing but I think what we see in practice is like there's really good data services and Google and so you're gonna have a data team like yeah maybe I want to go leverage that because I'm sort of isolated from the rest of the business I can just go use bigquery and you know some of these data pieces on their own versus you know if I'm in the business of managing SharePoint for the business like even if all my apps are running in AWS there's value in me saying yeah it's Microsoft's problem to do manage SharePoint like I don't really don't care right so I think what we see is like yeah at a hundred thousand if you view maybe you don't see the differentiation but when you zoom in it's there and in practice the practitioners will find it and use it so one thing I see happen a lot when people working a multi cloud is a confusion and definition when you say multi-cloud to a room of people usually there's a handful people have totally different thoughts of what multi cloud is and I really only believe in one of them strongly I think the other ones are somewhat real but one is very real and the four definitions are workload portability workflow portability data portability and traffic portability and so really quickly though the way I look at those is workload portability is the idea that you write your app once and run it anywhere so the same app you write for one cloud could just run anywhere and that's very difficult to achieve because you want to integrate with these high level services that a cloud provider provides native vlogging lambda is a good example and you don't want to dilute it the cloud to at least common denominator so you really want to write workloads for a single cloud the second one is work flow portability and that's the one I strongly believe in that's the idea that you could maintain as consistent work flow across clouds for deployment security SiC networking and so on and I think that's very achievable I mean that's what our products do is workflow level portability and there's data and traffic both of those are you know data is being able to move data from one cloud Rider to another the biggest thing against you there's just the speed of light that's it's not very realistic and for people talk about things like data gravity yeah it's very hard to you know if you're moving a gig okay once you're moving a hundred terabytes it costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of time faster to load it in an airplane yeah exactly yeah and then the last ones the traffic portability which is which is pretty real it's if you have geographically dispersed users you could actually route to the nearest cloud provider that could service them and that's that's pretty reasonable right and I think realistically it's like you'll you might see examples of each of those but in practice I feel like you see workflow portability right if you standardize on tools like terraform you can provision across multiple clouds pretty easily data portability I think you almost never see in practice right the cost is to astronomical where you know to your point traffic portability if you have copies running multiple clouds you just do traffic shaping it's relatively achievable but yeah you really only see workflow and traffic in practice yeah and the funny thing I see happen now that we've we've watched this multi cloud journey for a few years now is that if you don't optimize for workflow portability upfront it's really really painful later and so what the cloud has been around long enough now that there are cloud first startups that are becoming public companies and they've been all one cloud for you know seven or eight years and after that they're now buying companies they're big enough to buy companies and they're buying a company on Azure or something and that experience of having this you know 800 person company having to suddenly deal with you know from N equals one to n equals two is extremely violent and we've seen multiple times where entire DevOps you know teams or security teams just leave the company because they view themselves a single cloud sort of organization and this is too violent and in a process sort of way and so you know I always say don't optimize multi cloud in terms of using multiple at first but optimize the workflow right away so even if you're a new company get the workflow right to use the single cloud and stick with a single cloud for as long as you can but at least one that goes from n equal one angles to your way better equipped to handle it yeah yeah I think that that seems fair so I think maybe just summarizing what you said it's like you know in some sense multi-cloud isn't necessarily a choice we see people make it's it's that it happens because of acquisition or merger or you just get credits and it's a good deal or there's something French treated service it just it sort of happens organically without it being a conscious choice and I think the reality is from our experience that optimized for workflow Portability and acknowledge that workload Portability and data portability are sort of you know they're kind of myths yeah right there's real cost associated with trying to architect for those yeah there's there's basically fear-based reasons and practical reasons and that there there are practical reasons right yeah [Music]

Channel: HashiCorp

Views: 6,681

Keywords: multicloud, Multi-cloud, Cloud computing, DevOps

Id: 1Xnfn8p5m4Q

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019