Public Cloud computing is a large part of enterprise IT alongside on-premises computing. Many organizations that had a cloud-first approach and are now gaining value from on-premises private clouds and seeing their changing business needs leading to changing cloud use. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast delves into the complexity of multiple cloud providers and features Maciej Lelusz, Jack Poller, Justin Warren, and host Alastair Cooke, all attendees at Cloud Field Day. The awareness of changing business needs is causing some re-thinking of how businesses use cloud platforms, possibly moving away from using cloud vendor specific services to bare VMs. VMs are far simpler to move from one cloud to another, or between public cloud and private cloud platforms. Over time, the market will speak and if there are too many cloud providers, we will see mergers, acquisitions or failures of smaller specialized cloud providers. In the meantime, choosing where to put which application for the best outcome can be a challenge for businesses.
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There are Too Many Clouds
Public Cloud computing is a large part of enterprise IT alongside on-premises computing. Many organizations that had a cloud-first approach and are now gaining value from on-premises private clouds and seeing their changing business needs leading to changing cloud use. Whether it a return to on-premises private clouds or moving applications between cloud providers, mobility and choice are important for accommodating changing needs.
In the early days of public cloud adoption, on-premises cloud was more of an aspiration than a reality. Over the years, private cloud has become a reality for many organisations, even if the main service delivered is a VM, rather than rich application services. If VMs are the tool of mobility between public clouds, then VMs are quite sufficient for mobility to private clouds. The biggest challenge in private cloud is that VMware by Broadcom has refocussed and repriced the most common private cloud platform. The change provides an opportunity for VMware to prove its value and for competing vendors to stake their claim to a large on-premises Virtualization market.
Beyond the big three, four or five public cloud providers, there are a plethora of smaller public clouds that offer their own unique value. Whether it is Digital Ocean with an easy consumption model or OVH jumping into the GPU-on-demand market for AI training, there is a public cloud platform for many different specialised use cases. Each cloud provider makes a large up-front investment in platform, their technology, and often their real estate. The investment is only to generate a return for their founders, if the market doesn’t adopt their services, then the provider’s lifespan is very finite. Sooner or later the market will drive towards a sustainable population of cloud providers delivering the services that help their clients.
One challenge to using multiple clouds is that there is little standardization of the services across clouds. In fact, public cloud providers aim to lock customers into their cloud by providing unique features and value. The unique value may be in providing developer productivity or in offering unique software licensing opportunities. Anywhere a business uses this unique cloud value to provide business value, the cost of leaving the specific cloud provider increases. There is an argument that using the lowest common denominator of cloud, the virtual machine or container, is a wise move to allow cloud platform choice. A database server in a VM is much easier to move between clouds that migrating from one cloud’s managed database service to a different provider. If the ability to do cloud arbitrage is important, then you need your applications to be portable and not locked to one cloud platform by its unique features and value.
Whether there are too many clouds is a matter of perspective and opinion. Time will tell whether there are too many cloud providers and whether standardization of cloud services will evolve. Right now, some companies will commit to a single cloud provider and seek to gain maximum value form that one cloud while other companies play the field and seek to gain separate value from each cloud. We are certainly seeing discussions about private cloud as an option for many applications and a concern as the incumbent primary provider is changing approach. Will we see more clouds over time or fewer?
Podcast Information
Alastair Cooke is a Tech Field Day Event Lead, now part of The Futurum Group. You can connect with Alastair on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter and you can read more of his research notes and insights on The Futurum Group’s website.
Justin Warren is the Founder and Chief Analyst at PivotNine. You can connect with Justin on X/Twitter or on LinkedIn. Learn more on PivotNine’s website. See Justin’s website to read more.
Jack Poller is and industry leading cybersecurity analyst and Founder of Paradigm Technica. You can connect with Jack on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter. Learn more on Paradigm Technica’s website.
Maciej Lelusz is the Founder & CEO of evoila Poland. You can connect with Maciej on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Learn more about him on his website.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast. If you enjoyed the discussion, please remember to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast application so you don’t miss an episode and do give us a rating and a review. This podcast was brought to you by Tech Field Day, home of IT experts from across the enterprise, now part of The Futurum Group.
