![\"\"](\"http:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/a10-300x150.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Kurt Haberkamp, VP of customer success at MariaDB, delves into the intricacies of single and multi-cloud strategies, emphasizing the importance of aligning technology choices with business and customer needs.<\/p>\n
Many enterprises now have multi-cloud strategies, while others cling to a single provider. Having more than one cloud provider reduces some risks, like uptime for time-sensitive transactions, but it also introduces other risks that IT must understand.<\/p>\n
Having a single cloud provider is relatively simple because there\u2019s only one vendor\u2019s roadmap and idiosyncrasies to worry about, but ultimately, that translates to a less flexible cloud stance. Depending on the nature and size of a business, one has to weigh the benefits and risks of having a multi-cloud strategy.<\/p>\n
Adding more cloud providers results in greater complexity because each has its own configuration, features, networking, and security approach. Understanding all that requires a range of skills that don\u2019t exist in a single cloud environment. Cloud vendors also have different upgrade schedules and policies about Kubernetes version control. All those differences need to be tracked.<\/p>\n
In addition, each cloud categorizes resources to change resource availability, so if you want a certain class of compute, it\u2019s called one thing on AWS and another on Azure or another public cloud. Similarly, the compute is configured differently depending on the vendor, and pricing varies. Cloud providers also have different naming conventions. Then, there are customer-facing issues that add yet more complexity.<\/p>\n
While there are many standards focused on the build aspect of development, there are far fewer that address deployment. For example, there\u2019s no standard for Kubernetes orchestration, which is problematic for organizations with multi-cloud deployments running applications at scale and under stress. There will likely never be a single Kubernetes orchestration standard because Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat are all optimizing it for business purposes.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, there are shrinking IT resources, even though small degrees of separation can wreak havoc. That means IT must understand all the differences if multiple app versions need to be deployed across multiple.<\/p>\n
Cloud preferences are nothing short of tribal regarding the community and the ecosystems. For example, some logistics companies refuse to work with AWS because AWS has its own logistics business. Other verticals have strong opinions about Google or IBM. Nevertheless, having a multi-cloud strategy is helpful for companies offering services because it insulates the organization from price increases and vendor lock-in.<\/p>\n
For example, a prospect recently told us that they\u2019re desperately trying to get off AWS because their reserved instances are expiring, and the renewal price is significantly higher than they expected whether they continue to use reserved instances or switch to non-reserved instances.<\/p>\n
Another company was the victim of a network-wide AWS outage, which is a tough way to learn about the virtues of multi-cloud. There was no time to move to another cloud or replicate between regions and availability zones. Had a multi-cloud strategy been in place, they could have pivoted rapidly.<\/p>\n
Of course, multi-cloud implementations aren\u2019t without flaws. The most obvious is the exponentially greater complexity of adding each new cloud provider.<\/p>\n
The other drawback is the additional training, oversight, and understanding a multi-cloud strategy requires, which may cause attrition. If an organization\u2019s budget doesn\u2019t allow hiring the required expertise, and the existing staff must fill in the gaps, the unrelenting pressure will quickly get old. Burnout and human capital issues are risks as organizations expand their multi-cloud footprint.<\/p>\n
The greatest benefit of a single-cloud implementation is simplicity. There\u2019s only one vendor\u2019s details to worry about.<\/p>\n
Suppose a business doesn\u2019t depend on real-time transactions and isn\u2019t susceptible to downtime and outages. In that case, a single cloud strategy may be preferable because there\u2019s only one set of standards to learn and one set of procedures to deploy, and it\u2019s easy to maintain one release pipeline for the CI\/CD stack.<\/p>\n
Of course, the risks of having a single cloud strategy are vendor lock-in and a need for higher availability.<\/p>\n
As with all technology, the best place to start is with organizational and customer needs rather than cloud features and benefits.<\/p>\n
Customers expect high performance, availability, and reliability because they increasingly use smartphones as their go-to computing device. As application developers have learned the hard way, there are cell and Wi-Fi issues, including spotty 5G reception. If one assumes their SLA is five or four nines, and it\u2019s three nines, that could be the root cause of an application performance problem. In that case, the two choices are to absorb the cost of a higher SLA or decide it\u2019s unnecessary and invest in innovation instead.<\/p>\n
The choice to transition to multi-cloud or not boils down to a cost-benefit analysis: how much business would be lost if the higher SLA costs were absorbed versus how much business would be lost if the company decides to go multi-cloud but doesn\u2019t have the right skills yet to do it.<\/p>\n
Application owners, business owners, and the people responsible for deployment must evaluate their organization\u2019s true needs. The \u201ccommon knowledge\u201d is that everything should be amazingly available, hyper-resilient, and hyper-performant when not all applications and business processes require the same SLA.<\/p>\n
A strong understanding of cloud provider technology differences and how customers interact with them is needed when expanding to multi-cloud. When asked about this, I typically suggest strong orchestration, networking, and problem-solving skills so that when an issue arises, they can jump in and troubleshoot.<\/p>\n
Many organizations have adopted a multi-cloud strategy, but not all were prepared for the complexity they faced. That\u2019s why the starting point needs to be business and customer requirements.<\/p>\n
Banks can\u2019t afford to have credit card transactions declined because they misjudged the SLA or the IT staff lacked the expertise needed to ensure automatic failover. Bank customers won\u2019t tolerate it, which leads to churn and unwanted headlines.<\/p>\n
Focusing on a business rather than a technology solution makes it easier to decide what the cloud strategy should be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kurt Haberkamp, VP of customer success at MariaDB, delves into the intricacies of single and multi-cloud strategies, emphasizing the importance of aligning technology choices with business and customer needs. Many enterprises now have multi-cloud strategies, while others cling to a… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/40"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/s946.sofamoci.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}