What happens when there’s not enough cloud?

 Multicloud may be the answer to the struggle to keep up with the overwhelming demand for cloud resources.

The initial promise of the cloud was to make limitless computing resources available to anyone in the world. Since then, one of the primary propellants of cloud has been the “illusion of infinite capacity,” as AWS CEO Adam Selipsky explained recently. Against this backdrop of the infinite, The Information’s Kevin McLaughlin kicked off the new quarter by delving into the reality of “infinite capacity.”

Cloud, after all, is just “someone else’s computer,” and that someone is constantly installing real servers in real data centers to ensure that the elasticity of cloud doesn’t break. It’s always been thus. Except not quite, because we’ve hit an inflection point in cloud adoption. The real story, therefore, isn’t about shortage of supply; it’s about the incredible, accelerating abundance of demand. This leads, in turn, to the other big story: If clouds are straining to keep up with voracious demand, that’s all the more reason to get serious about multicloud.

Multicloud your way to more capacity

It’s absolutely true that the original view of multicloud as some nirvanic CIO playground in the sky is garbage. Workloads don’t magically work across clouds, given that even commodities like compute differ considerably from one cloud to the next. And the more an enterprise invests in a given cloud’s higher-order services, the harder it becomes to replicate that experience on a different cloud provider.

Given the paramount importance of the productivity of developers, this vision of cloud is the equivalent of fool’s gold—shiny but worthless.

With a microservices-based approach, enterprises absolutely can tap into the best services that different clouds have to offer and pair them together. An enterprise could, for example, host its live e-commerce site with customer data and product catalog on AWS and then have a replica hosted on Google Cloud to create personalization and offers from customer interactions. To be clear, it’s not enough to architect multicloud into just the app or data tier. It won’t do an enterprise much good if its app tier is resilient across clouds but the data tier falls into the abyss. Enterprises need to architect both their applications and associated data infrastructure to be multicloud.

It’s not simple, but it’s definitely doable and increasingly important. In a world of potential capacity constraints, multicloud becomes critical for ensuring business continuity. How? By making it possible to move an application between clouds to maximize access to capacity. Many enterprises struggle to do multicloud well, but as-a-service vendors are filling that gap with database, data streaming, and other services that bridge the clouds for the customer. That way, if Microsoft’s Azure West US 2 region is temporarily reaching capacity, customers can move their application to Google us-west1, assuming their as-a-service vendor operates in both, and assuming they’ve architected in such a way that both app tier and data tier can easily move.

None of this is intended to paint an overly rosy picture of multicloud. Rather, it’s to suggest that given we’re nowhere near saturation on cloud demand, we’re all going to have to get smarter about how we maximize cloud supply. Multicloud can help.

By-

Atharv Deshpande

Assistant Web Developer ELESA