Inevitably, the technology news cycle follows a pattern of hype-the-plus to exaggerate-the-minuses. We have two recent stories that seem to pit one extreme and the other, one that says that the cloud in general and multi-cloud in particular has “hit a wall”, and another that says that “there’s no going back from multicloud”. Can we learn anything by looking at the two in combination? Let’s give it a shot.
I’ve noted in past blogs that the general perception is that everything is moving to the cloud. Another article, this one in ZDnet, says “a recent survey of 300 IT executives by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, underwritten by Splunk, which finds while at this moment, most organizations still have most of their technology systems in house. But get ready to start bidding farewell to on-premises IT.”
This, according to enterprises I’ve talked with, my modeling, and my own views, is inaccurate. Few data center applications are actually moving to the cloud. Instead, what’s happening is that application modernization is creating front-ends for applications, hosted in the cloud. One of the goals of appmod is the creation of web-based portals through which existing applications can be accessed optimally by a range of people, including customers, partners, and employees. This myth-versus-reality contrast might be a reason why some say that the cloud has hit a wall.
If you look at the data centers today, you don’t find empty halls with ghostly echos and maybe a little mist (air conditioning?) to add a sense of mystery. It looks pretty much like business as usual, and if you thought that cloud success was about eliminating data centers, you could be forgiven for thinking that the cloud was falling short. The story, in VentureBeat, quotes a research report saying “Seventy-six percent of respondents agreed with that their company is hitting a wall while using their existing programs and tools to achieve cloud objectives” and that only 8% say that they’re certain they’re getting the value they need from the cloud.
This is obviously a different wall to hit than the one the headline suggests. The survey point is that companies don’t believe their current tools, programs, and initiatives are securing everything they want from the cloud. That could well be true, but if so it could be a fault of the tools, etc., or the expectations…or both. Without knowing the details on just who said what (the study included “over 500 senior IT, devops, secops and finops leaders from large enterprises worldwide”) it’s hard to say whether we’re shy of tools or have an excess of expectations.
The specific problem area the article cites is multi-cloud in general, and “visibility” in particular. The ZDnet piece cited a survey that was sponsored by an observability company, too. The theme of this is that we’re held back from totally abandoning data centers by our inability to grasp the state of the multi-cloud.
But how do we reconcile this skepticism with the second article, this one from Protocol, that says that the cloud and multi-cloud is not hitting the wall, it’s in fact inevitable? It quotes not a survey but “Priyanka Sharma, the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president and CEO; and David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte”. That piece is filled with comments like “multi-cloud chooses you” and “the move to multi-cloud is a natural progression”. Maybe we’re destined for the cloud, but doomed to do it badly?
Taken as a group, the articles seem to be really about “multi-cloud” more than the cloud in general. That raises the question of just why enterprises adopt multi-cloud in the first place. I think that the VentureBeat piece, and the survey it cites, view multi-cloud as something that creates a unified “front-end” piece of a hybrid cloud by combining a bunch of public clouds into a single resource pool. Knowing what’s going on in that unified cloud, given the separation of administration, is something that the responding enterprises worried about. I’m not totally comfortable with this, nor with the presumption that the visibility issues are hamstringing enterprise cloud adoption. First, I doubt that there’s any significant number of enterprises who think they have all the tools they need for any technical mission. Second, I don’t think that the phrasing of the questions in the survey are such that the responses can be associated conclusively with multi-cloud at all.
The Protocol piece suggests that the most significant driver of multi-cloud isn’t the desire to avoid cloud lock-in, but the fact that some applications are better supported on one particular cloud than another. If you have a range of applications, you’d naturally end up with a range of clouds. Hence, the “multi-cloud chooses you” tag line. That some cloud users pick multiple providers because of differences in how applications are supported on each is true, but my enterprise contacts still suggest that backup is an important consideration.
Here’s the key point. If multi-cloud is driven mostly by specialized selection of cloud providers based on application support, there would be little chance that the clouds would operate as a unified pool of resources, and less chance that cohesive monitoring (“visibility”) would be a requirement. Where cohesion of visibility is important is where resources across the clouds are treated as cohesive, meaning belonging to a common pool.
Even if we assumed that an enterprise wanted all their public clouds to create a single unified resource pool, though, I contend that this doesn’t present a unique visibility challenge. You can get software from HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and others that can be run in the cloud or in the data center, software that’s already running production applications in both, in fact.
There is a risk to the cloud reflected in these articles, but it’s not the risk the articles are promoting. The risk is the articles themselves, the presumption they make about the cloud and its growth. The actual mission of the cloud, whether “cloud”, “hybrid cloud” “multi-cloud” or some strange hybrid, is obvious based on current activity. We use the cloud to build a user experience, not to process transactions, run business reports, and so forth. Cloud providers and cloud software vendors may well believe that broader cloud use would benefit them, and they’d be right. That’s not the question; the question is whether it would benefit the buyers.
Admitting to the real mission, focusing development and conferences and research on the actual mission, could not only improve the cloud’s response to that mission, but also extend cloud usage to other areas with similar technical needs. Metaverse, IoT, edge computing—all these things are real-time activities, and the user experience is likewise. Why not try to push for cloud progress where progress could obviously be made?
The cloud has enjoyed almost boundless support in the tech media for decades, and while simple PR support can’t substitute for a business case, it’s certainly encouraged tech planners to look for one. If we set expectations for the cloud that are totally unrealistic, and if we then start planners on a quest to somehow meet those expectations by taking steps that will end up failing to do the impossible, will we not hurt the cloud of the future?