Multicloud - the big trend of 2021

Cloud is everything. There is no question about it. In 2021 no sane software platform can be made without thinking of using some kind of cloud infrastructure. Cloud opens up the infinite opportunities of scalability without the infinite need for time, effort and resources. Cloud only approach was an obvious technical eventuality that the world was heading to anyway but the 2020 pandemic made sure that it happened fast and there were no turning back.

However there is a dark cloud (couldn’t resist it :) ) in this cloudy future - vendor lockdown and single point of failure.

OK, the single point of failure would have been laughed at by the proponents of the cloud as it is one of the big the selling point for all cloud strategies that they are distributed and are NOT a single point of failure architecture but Google’s blackout in the middle of December 2020 (to cap off a very strange year) makes it a bit harder to laugh these days. A single outage by a single “cloud“ probably took down more than half of the entire world’s workforce. Dependency on a single vendor is always bad, and it doesn’t matter if that single vendor is one of the world richest company or the world’s ex- “don’t be evil” company.

This is where the multi in the multicloud buzzword comes in. Simply put it’s a strategy to use multiple independent cloud platforms so that you are not dependent on any single all powerful platform. AWS owns the cloud space by 32% market share but that doesn’t mean AWS is the only show in town. Microsoft is and Google is making it’s mark with 19% and 7% market share and the new kid on the block is Alibaba Cloud which is predicted to come behind Google as the 4th big player. Apart from these major players there already exists a whole ecosystem of smaller players and private clouds. So there is absolutely no reason to be dependent solely on a single cloud and be their slave forever. This is reflected in smart decision of multicloud strategies that companies are now starting to take - the recent big one was CIA with their multi-billion dollar multicloud strategy.

Even the great AWS is starting to realize that multicloud is the way forward and not accepting it and not having interoperability with other clouds may lead to them being like Microsoft on their old desktop strategy a long time back. This was reflected when AWS quietly joined the multicloud movement - The Information reported in October 2020 with AWS planning a multicloud service during re:Invent. ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere coming this year is a definite step towards the multicloud space that AWS is being forced to take.

A quote from someone inside AWS says it all:

"AWS realizes that they are not the be-all and end-all in the cloud. They are pushing hard to make sure they can manage services across cloud providers,"

So the giant is accepting the truth! Better late than never…

MS and Google has always been very interested about multicloud probably because they realized how late they got into this cloud business and most companies of the world probably already have some kind of AWS relationship anyway. Azure Arc is their future planning laid bare and Google Cloud's Anthos product, is the other giant’s way of accepting multicloud.

Multicloud is here to stay. So follow this trend closely. We’ll keep you posted too.