On Multi-Cloud Management: the Incremental and the Transformative
December 9, 2014By Jared Ruckle, Senior Product Manager. Find Jared on Twitter
Public cloud has so many enterprise IT execs excited. The excitement stems from the right objectives (agility, OpEx, getting out of the infrastructure business), but is often associated with false expectations.
Namely, the idea of an expansive, highly-centralized multi-cloud strategy. In this scenario, an IT pro manages multiple clouds with ease. Key to this vision: a “single pane of glass” management and orchestration layer.
The idea is solid – it hypothetically delivers interoperability, access to innovation across providers, and pricing arbitrage. Who doesn’t want to seamlessly move workloads across clouds, without missing out on new features or price drops?
But the reality doesn’t match up. Here are the problems:
- Cloud interoperability is very difficult to achieve. From a slew of service provider APIs, and a few open source ones, to monitoring, metering and identity and access requirements – just to name a few – its clear that “lifting and shifting” workloads from one place to another is not as easy at it might seem at first glance.
- New features from each cloud provider take time to integrate into each 3rd party management tool. These vendors need to keep pace with innovation as well. By definition, they will always be a few steps behind the