The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 16

eggs in one basket” multi-cloud approach is by definition limited to using the lowest
common denominator set of features shared by the two cloud providers. This again
results in an agility penalty, because when new cloud provider features and services are
being considered, it is necessary to wait until BOTH providers offer the feature or ser-
vice before it can be used in this form of multi-cloud implementation.
Architectural Similarity (“Like for Like”)
It’s not uncommon to find different technology stacks in different divisions or depart-
ments, because of acquisitions or high levels of autonomy among groups. One division
might be heavily built out on the Microsoft ecosystem with SQL Server, .NET and C#,
while another has a history of Linux, Java and other open source technologies. We
sometimes see a pattern where individual departments may choose to extend work-
loads into the public cloud based on ease of migration to a given public cloud. For exam-
ple, Microsoft Azure offers ease of migration for Microsoft workloads, so it’s not uncom-
mon for a department or group to choose Microsoft Azure as their public cloud for that
reason, while another department may choose AWS.
It’s important to note that this pattern is not usually consistent with best practice. While
it offers some cloud benefits (e.g., OpEx over CapEx, scalability and agility), it creates
two or more separate public cloud footprints, adding operational complexity, and limit-
ing the ability to achieve a cohesive view of costs. It essentially becomes two duplicate
environments.
Feature Availability (“Best of Breed”)
While the multi-cloud approaches above are fairly common today, we feel that a differ-
ent model should be considered as a more successful one moving into the future. This
promising multi-cloud architecture can be thought of as “Best of Breed.” With this
approach, the mindset is that the agility risk imposed by insisting on duplicating all fea-
tures in both environments actually costs the enterprise more than the stability that is
theoretically gained by deploying two totally interchangeable cloud provider feature
sets. Here the guiding principle is that in order to reap the full benefits of cloud, being
able to take advantage of the best service and feature advances is of utmost
importance.
A good best of breed approach involves selecting a primary cloud vendor. This vendor
is where the main center of gravity for cloud operations lives, with the primary identity
and security designs centralized around the main provider. It is of course straightfor-
ward to utilize new services and features from the primary vendor, but the enterprise
also explicitly leaves open the possibility of reaching across to another cloud vendor for
a specific service, capability or feature that is either not available from the primary cloud
vendor, or does not meet requirements as well.
14 | THE DOPPLER | SPECIAL EDITION 2019