By Jack Vaughan
Cloud and multicloud design decisions
Industry veteran Eric Newcomer said early attempts to follow the multicloud path were challenged by incompatible tooling. As teams tried to move workloads from one to another cloud, there were setbacks.
These setbacks were especially acute around the complexity encountered when integrating the different security, monitoring, logging and other services employed by different cloud providers. Even using tooling certified to run across a variety of clouds did not ensure ease of integration, Newcomer, now principal analyst and CTO at advisory firm Intellyx, told SDxCentral.
Since the early days,he said, architectural decisions on multicloud integration pit best-of-breed services and ‘lock-in’ versus the generic approaches that may be cumbersome to develop and maintain.
“Today, you continue to have this whole debate about going with the native version and getting locked in versus trying to go with something generic and protect yourself from lock in,” Newcomer told SDxCentral.
Debates also continue to revolve around the refactoring choices that need to be made if monolithic applications are going to move to cloud at all. Such applications, as Newcomer described in a recent blog post on cloud infrastructure, were built to serve during a traditional business workday of yore – not to serve in an always-on container-based microservices style environment. Moreover, the legacy apps are often built for carefully maintained custom hardware, rather than the always-ready-to-fail-over commodity hardware of the cloud architecture.
Newcomer said a recent development of note is the rise of several independent software vendors in the cloud realm. The list, he said, might range from players such as database maker Cockroach Labs to ones like cloud data analytics powerhouse Snowflake and others. These companies can further multicloud by building products that are the same across multiple clouds. In this they stand apart from big cloud providers that are competing on differentiation of their services, and may have less interest in portability and compatibility.
