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Welcome to Mostly Cloudy! People will tell you that you can read multiple cloud computing newsletters, but you should go all-in on this one.
This Week in Cloud: Options are good, until they’re not
With cloud computing firmly established as a vital resource for companies building a business using technology — which in 2019 is just about every company — more and more of those businesses are starting to think about hedging their bets across multiple cloud providers.
After all, there’s a generation of tech buyers burned by the enterprise vendor practices of the last 20 years, with their license audits and half-hearted incremental feature updates driven by the fact that their customers have invested way too much in vendor-optimized software infrastructure to ever switch: the dreaded “lock-in.”
But managing multiple tech vendors is its own challenge. As the pinball-inept husband of a pinball enthusiast, the ongoing debate over multicloud strategies this week reminded me of multiball, when you’ve unlocked the potential to score a ton of points with three or more balls in action but find yourself mashing the flippers at three or more times the pace.
When faced with such difficult questions, it’s often best to turn to the brightest minds in this industry.
That anonymous gadfly Twitter account has a point. But even the notion of “poly-cloud” has its challenges, as each cloud vendor has a slightly different way of providing their services that requires unique coding and specialized knowledge.
As we saw earlier this week at VMworld, there has been an explosion in tools that promise multicloud capabilities to tech buyers wary of the power inherent in the consolidation of enterprise computing across three or four large companies. And it’s no coincidence that the benefits of a multicloud strategy are evoked most often by the companies scrambling to catch up to market leader Amazon Web Services.
Multicloud (or polycloud, or whatever) is not going to save you from hitching your wagon to a particular technology or service for an extended period of time, as Gregor Hohpe pointed out on Martin Fowler’s site this week. Exchanging the lock-in of AWS for the lock-in of Kubernetes may or may not be the best move, as anyone who bet on OpenStack will remind you.
It’s always notable how philosophical the discussions around cloud lock-in become, especially over drinks when we’ve all agreed to stop taking notes. Last year at AWS re:Invent, New Relic CEO Lew Cirne told me that one of his financial-industry customers runs identical, duplicate installations of key mission-critical workloads on two prominent cloud providers, prioritizing resiliency and flexibility over the massive outlay of time and money required to maintain that posture.
That strategy is not for the faint of heart or light of wallet. Even the U.S. Department of Defense, which has the largest and heaviest wallet on the planet, declared that it wanted to pursue a single vendor for the JEDI cloud contract in part because of the hassle and cost involved in managing multiple cloud environments.
But the polycloud idea might make sense for companies that are willing to push the envelope in order to get the best services possible. As the basics of cloud computing (compute, storage, and databases) become commodities, tech vendors battling for cloud workloads will continue to emphasize their unique strengths, whether that’s edge computing, artificial intelligence, or serverless computing.
Everyone’s application is slightly different, which means that every cloud buyer has slightly different needs. For most companies, managing one ball per turn is more than enough, but pinball wizards capable of managing the complexity of multiple clouds could unlock new capabilities that set them apart from the competition.
And Now, A Word…
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Around the Cloud
Aggressive Amazon tactic pushes you to consider its own brand before you click ‘buy’ (Washington Post)
This isn’t cloudy, per se, but the always entertaining Jay Greene zeros in on one of the most compelling arguments as to why AWS should be a separate company. There’s no way AWS becomes AWS without Amazon’s operational skills and immense reach, but it’s getting harder and harder for prospective customers to justify doing business with a company that intends on competing directly with those customers.
National Security Concerns Threaten Undersea Data Link Backed by Google, Facebook (The Wall Street Journal)
The global reach of cloud computing would not be possible without the dozens of undersea cables that link continents. Concerns that the Chinese government might be listening in on a new cable project from Los Angeles to Hong Kong could make it much more difficult to construct such cables in a world of growing tensions between East and West.
Cloud Security Boom Creates New Crop of Tech Darlings (Bloomberg)
Cloud computing requires a different way of thinking about security, and that has led to enormous opportunity for companies willing to teach cloud migrants how to be secure for exorbitant fees. Bloomberg takes a look at the growing market for cloud security, which was also a big driver of VMware’s $2.1 billion purchase of Carbon Black last week.
Pat Gelsinger and his calculated plan for VMware (ZDnet)
A frequent visitor to Las Vegas gets a (maybe real?) tattoo. (Pat Gelsinger Twitter photo)
Speaking of VMware, its time in the spotlight has just about run its course as the tech industry gears up for the fall launch season, but this interview with CEO Pat Gelsinger is worth your time. Gelsinger is an extremely interesting person, a key part of more technology advances in the 80s, 90s, and beyond than most people realize, and he should be on the short list of any enterprise technology company’s CEO search.
Puppet Turns Its Automation Focus to Security with Puppet Remediate (The New Stack)
Speaking of security, Puppet is starting to realize that its core market for data center infrastructure management software is shifting, and it has little choice but to respond accordingly. Remediate was designed to not only find software vulnerabilities, but fix them, across multiple cloud and on-premises environments.
Federal grand jury indicts Paige Thompson on two counts related to the Capital One data breach (Techcrunch)
The ex-AWS engineer behind the Capital One hack is likely facing extended time in prison. More than 30 companies were affected by Thompson’s alleged exploits of poor firewall configuration practices used by AWS customers, and a significant amount of consumer data was exposed.
Microsoft Vendors Win a $7.6 Billion Deal for Pentagon Software (Bloomberg)
While everybody freaks out about the $10 billion JEDI contract, a $7.6 billion cloud software contract just kinda happened with almost no fanfare. This deal involves resellers offering Office 365 and other software services, which is a different level of engagement than infrastructure cloud services but will still result in a big payday.
Cloud computing's no PICNIC*: Yep, biggest security risks down to customer, not provider (The Register)
That’s “Problem In Chair, Not In Computer,” a tech support anachronism akin to an auto mechanic diagnosing a problem as “the nut behind the wheel.” (God bless El Reg.) Time and time again cloud customers fail to understand that different ways of applying security measures are needed in the cloud, despite the plethora of security features offered by modern cloud providers.
Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure (Ars Technica)
It’s impossible to imagine modern computing without Unix, the operating system that became the basis of almost all the software we encounter on a daily basis. Ars Technica takes a deep look at this pioneering technology, which also illustrates how the modern technology industry has such little regard for its history.
