What I Learned at IFX2018 about the Journey to Multi-cloud

Last week at the joint event IFX 2018 Celebrating the Craft and Culture of Infrastructure that we held with Packet.com, the topic of multi-cloud implementations, and the pros/cons of single vs. multi-cloud implementations came up over and over again.

From a development standpoint, from an engineering, business impact, or partnership perspective – nearly everyone that I talked to over the 2-day event was concerned about how to plot a way forward into the next generation of the cloud. And that story was inevitably about the journey to multi-cloud implementations.

Here’s the story that evolved…

A Single (Monolithic) Cloud Platform = A Trap

First-generation cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform talk a good game about openness and interoperability. But that assumes you want to stay within THEIR cloud, or pay very real costs to play outside of their cloud.

In practice, they reel in customers with what appear to be low prices (ignore that fine print), and then the unexpected and hard to estimate charges start showing up on your bill, which may be thousands if not literally hundreds of millions of billing lines long in large deployments.

Witness this tweet from Michael Liebow at Accenture during re:invent just a few blocks away from IFX:

After years of incubation, great to see cloud econ getting its due. My @awscloud bill last MONTH was 463,000,000 lines. The problem is real.

— Mikey Likes (@mliebow) November 27, 2018

Ouch.

Unfortunately, for all intents and purposes Cloud 1.0 platforms are closed systems, as we say at Wasabi, it’s a “Hotel California” situation – you can check out, but you can never leave (without paying significantly).

Once you pick a Cloud 1.0 platform, you often have no practical choice but to use it for all facets of application development and delivery. The convenience of staying within that cloud is too easy to just brush aside, and you don’t realize just how unpredictable and expensive the costs can be until you are months into your journey.

The Antidote? Multi-Cloud Strategies with Next-Generation Cloud Providers

Multi-cloud implementations with Cloud 2.0 providers offer a number of potential advantages over single-cloud platform providers, including:

• Greater choice – you can pick and choose the best cloud provider for each particular function (compute, storage, networking, etc.)
• Better economics – you can choose the provider that offers the best pricing for a particular set of capabilities
• Optimal performance – you can use different providers to support different types of applications
• Improved resiliency – you can run applications on multiple clouds to ensure continuous availability in the event of a service outage of any single cloud provider

While a closed ecosystem might work well for certain applications (think Apple’s App Store) it’s not well suited for today’s dynamic world of cloud-based applications and services.

Surely a single provider can’t offer the best pricing, performance and functionality for each component of the end-to-end application architecture and software lifecycle, across every geography, can they?

The Power of Choice

Wasabi was conceived for the multi-cloud world.

We believe customers should have the freedom to pick and choose the cloud providers that best meet their particular functional needs and budget requirements.

You can use Wasabi in conjunction with other clouds to build a best-of-breed environment, tailored to your specific business needs, at price/performance ratios that are radically better than the market has come to expect from Cloud 1.0 providers.

And we’ll never charge you to move data from Wasabi to another cloud. We pioneered the “No Egress Fees” movement in March 2018, and are proud to continue to blaze that path.

Our recent announcement with bare-metal compute provider Packet demonstrates our commitment to the multi-cloud concept.  The integrated solution, with unified management, will allow Packet compute customers to easily leverage Wasabi storage, and Wasabi customers to efficiently leverage Packet compute resources—with no data transfer fees. Read more about the joint announcement from our CEO, David Friend.

And our participation in Cloudflare’s Bandwidth Alliance is another example of our commitment to keeping our focus on the needs of customers – great performance at a great price with no penalties for choosing other solutions to mix and match the best of the best.

We’re in This for the Long Haul, and It’s Only Just Getting Started

If you value your freedom in a world that is only going to continue to move deeper into the cloud, we welcome you to join us in building the next generation, multi-cloud ecosystem that treats customers as partners rather than hostages.

The cloud journey has only just begun. We believe you should be able to keep your budget focused on YOUR business and all of the great things you’re going to build in the cloud for years to come.

The attendees of IFX2018, regardless of what hat they were wearing repeated their desire to have the ability to make choices that free up their budget and mental energy for all of the innovations they are being asked to work on, and becoming expert “cloud economists” is not high on that to-do list for most of them.