What is multi cloud?
A multi cloud application is an application where the compute and storage components run on multiple public cloud service providers.
Pros and cons
Going multi-cloud reduces dependence on one single cloud service provider; it also minimizes the impact in case one of the providers should go down. You can continuously pick the most convenient offerings which also gives you bargaining power and keeps the market competition healthy.
You might also be subject to regulatory requirements or SLAs where going multi-cloud allows you to stay within certain geographies.
Multi-cloud applications incur additional data transfer costs that often outweigh any initial cost savings.
However, it greatly increases the development time:
- Multi-cloud component must be developed and maintained for each provider
- It is much more complex to leverage other built-in services covering aspects such as monitoring, logging, security, and backup.
- The increased attack surface and the diversity of security features make challenging to implement consistent security policies across all platforms
Conclusion
Going multi-cloud needs specific use cases to justify the decision. In most cases, it is simpler and faster to go with one cloud provider. You can leverage all the tools and services allowing you to build successful applications; the time to market will be a fraction compared to going multi-cloud. Customer success oriented cloud service providers such as AWS want you to succeed, they invest heavily in creating tools and services to increase your productivity and optimize your costs. With their highly available and resilient infrastructure chances of experiencing outages are close to zero.