Quick note about multicloud

A few days ago, I was able to attend a conference dealing with multi-cloud¹. The very content of the presentation ultimately turned out to be just a wobbly pros/cons table about multi-cloud. In the end, the most interesting part was the question and answer session. As I was very skeptical about the speaker’s answers or even about his somewhat too enthusiastic posture for multi-cloud, I wanted to offer some feedback on this theme and give my position.

Multi-cloud is not something desirable today.

And I will start by recalling, as mentioned by the speaker, the benefits of multi-cloud:

• the ability to bring competition into play when negociating/choosing services. That is all. And even this unique advantage can be discussed. Because in a context where just finding an infrastructure engineer is a long run, do we really want to waste this precious bandwidth on a multi-cloud?

The only reason that can lead to an acceptable multi-cloud situation would be legacy, such as acquisition and merger. Otherwise, don’t go there voluntarily, because having to work on the lowest common denominator of different clouds would take us 10 years backward. The future of the cloud is in the managed, is in the vendor-locking.

It’s quite shocking to say, but let’s understand that the resources of ICTs are limited. So limited that investing the equivalent of a salary in a tool that would save man-months is the kind of leverage that ultimately allows you to effectively manage your budget. Let’s not be hesitant to engage deeply with a cloud-provider, whichever it is, because all the power of their solution really happens when fully used. And it’s not achievable here for multi-cloud. Very few companies are able to retail a painless lift&shift, quite the contrary. It saddens me even more that firms such as the presenter’s advise on this type of time-consuming infrastructure, and it is in their very interest.

The only thing multi-cloud can do is reinvent the wheel at your expense.