93% of the world’s companies use more than just one cloud provider in order to maximize their revenue or to avoid being locked-in by one vendor. You might be using just one cloud provider for the moment. However, you should know that switching to different cloud providers anytime is beneficial for you and your business. What is more, this can offer you amazing alternatives and services you didn’t know before and it wouldn’t cause too much trouble. There’s only one more question to be asked: how do you become more independent? That’s when the cloud agnostic concept comes in handy. We will explain this step by step:
1. COVID pandemic and clouds
In a Flexera study recently conducted, 57% of companies made a clear statement: the whole pandemic situation augmented their cloud computing interest. Moreover, 8% stated that what has been happening in the world changed a little bit their cloud expansion ideas.
40% of small businesses and medium ones plan on increasing their funding regarding cloud computing in 2020, 2021 and further. 59% of big enterprises plan on doing the same. Cloud adoption is being moved forward by companies from all over the world. Some of these companies want to choose an alternative that is bringing them more benefits, in other words, makes them less dependent on their cloud providers.
2. What does “Cloud Agnostic” mean?
The cloud term is all about the innovation, the revolution model.
By cloud agnostic, we understand that type of architecture that is made to be neutral when it comes to using a specific cloud. Some of the experts think that a really cloud-agnostic architecture uses every occasion to create a highly portable system. This type of systems allow you to change the providers you have with ease. What is more, building such a solution by using an approach of this type helps you a lot in the future. It will be less time and money consuming when you move to a different provider, which is great news for you and your business.
3. Want to go cloud agnostic? Here are the top reasons for you to do so:
You might have many reasons for which you want to become cloud-agnostic. The first one might be the imminent danger of being locked-in by the vendors, which isn’t a really pleasant situation. The companies which consider or implement cloud adoption simply don’t want to become too dependent on only one vendor. So they start searching for alternatives.
a. The risks of being locked-in by your vendor
- The supplier might change their offers or even the product, moving from an older technology to a new one or they might simply have other business emergencies and needs, so that they don’t align anymore with your expectations and needs.
- The quality of their services might as well decline and/ or not meet your needs anymore. Therefore, you might find in a situation where you are stuck with your vendors for whatever legal reason or you might have become way too dependent on their services that it could affect your business if you give them up.
- They can change their prices because, after all, business is business. Or you might, as well, get a better offer from another cloud provider.
- Your provider might simply want to take a step back and get out of the cloud business. While this might not happen in the case that you use a big cloud provider, there were still some shocking cases in the past.
b. Hybrid / multi-cloud strategies
There might be another reason that strongly motivates you to go cloud-agnostic. You might want to use a hybrid or a multi-cloud strategy in order to feel safer. Studies have been conducted and studies show that only 7% of the companies use a single public or private cloud.
Therefore, the majority of the companies choose the multi-cloud option in order to avoid unpleasant “surprises”. Even so, there’s still a question to be asked: how do you manage these environments successfully? The answer is rather simple: through the cloud agnostic architecture.
Asking again questions, we have to answer to only a few more: which are the benefits of this approach and which are the downsides?
The good
If you can understand and put into practice this type of strategy, this will greatly benefit you and your company, from both technical and business perspectives.
- We’re not trying to say obvious things here, but the very first benefit that comes to mind is the fact that by using this strategy you will definitely avoid being locked-in by your provider. What is more, this type of strategy allows the IT business to increase their portfolio and they will become even more pliable when it comes to the challenges in the IT field.
- Risk management is made easier. Without trying to be too obvious, it is easier to change the tactics or manage the risks when you do not rely on only one supplier.
- You will take advantage of more flexibility and customization. This will definitely be a great choice for your business if you mix the cloud-agnostic approach with a multi-cloud strategy.
- Open source technologies will be available to you and you will therefore be able to develop the strategy that really suits your business.
- Migration will be made with ease. You will be able to move from one cloud provider to another if you want to.
- Coverage – this one is a really interesting aspect. Let’s say that your system is based in multiple clouds or can be moved to a new one with ease. This means that you will be covered, even if you or your vendor encounter any type of problems.
- Consistency. Use more than just one cloud to achieve consistency.
The bad
As every domain has its ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, the cloud agnostic strategy is no different from other niches. So here are some downsides of this domain:
- If you simply want to be cool and that’s why you’ve become cloud agnostic, you might be missing some important and nice features out there. For example, Azure might add some new features or tools, which you’d love trying. In the case that you use multiple clouds, you have to wait until others get this option.
- Sometimes, it gets rather pricey. The cost might be higher than you expected and that can be a turn-off.
How to successfully become cloud agnostic
While there’s no “magic success receipt”, there are still some strategies you can use, strategies which have proven to work:
1. Automation should be adopted early in this process
The cloud agnostic approach can augment the workload for the DevOps engineers. Therefore you should focus on the approach of automatization. Your whole infrastructure should be easy to scale with a minimum of manual intervention. The very same principles should be applied to the CD/CI pipelines. There are tools which can help these processes, some open-source and some commercial. Choose whichever is more suitable for you, both financially and professionally.
2. Choose the microservices architecture
Microservices are always a good idea, whether you are working on an app or working on launching a brand new product. By using microservices, you will be able to break down your app into different modules. This will make your app easier to be developed, tested and deployed. Going even further, this type of services reduce the dependency on a single tech stack.
3. Consider Containerization
Make your application(s) portable with this type of technology. The containers can, in the majority of cases, be launched on the platforms without specific customization from the host environment.
Does the Cloud Agnostic alternative seem appealing to you?
The whole Cloud Agnostic system has been built in order to make you and your business less dependent on different vendors, who might change their policies and prices. By using it, you can therefore become more independent in your IT mission. If you want to learn more about servers and this type of solutions, get in touch with us by completing the form below.
Block "214" not found