you do , but I would explore every last solution to provide redundancy and HA on the existing cloud provider first .
Then there is the time . Remember how long it took and the number of iterations required until the existing landing zone was actually usable in production ? Do you want to go through all of that again with the next cloud provider whose APIs and architecture are completely different ? What does the business give up when you make that investment ? What features and services could you deliver in that same time frame that could add to the company ’ s bottom line ?
Let me be clear here . I am not advocating that hybrid or multi-cloud strategies are bad . What I am saying is if the sole purpose of the strategy is for failover , I believe that is a misguided strategy . The best reasons for hybrid or multi-cloud strategies is to leverage the best cloud APIs to solve your business problem . For example , it is not uncommon for a company to use AWS for most business problems but leverage Google for its big data and analytics capabilities .
Our Recommendations
1 . Cloud providers will experience outages to services on rare occasions that may impact your ability to keep your applications running . Do keep in mind that the frequency that this happens is significantly less than what almost every company in the world experiences in their own data center . So let ’ s stop thinking we can run data centers better than Amazon , Google and Microsoft .
2 . Before embarking on an expensive and time consuming journey to stand up a second cloud for HA , explore every possible option to provide HA on your current cloud provider . Every time there is an outage you see the stories of companies who went down for hours . There are also many companies who don ’ t go down because they anticipated that every API can and will fail at some time .
3 . Ignore the noise . When these issues arise , all of the vendors who are getting their butts kicked by AWS come out of the woodwork to claim they told you so and that you should use their stuff . Private cloud and datacenter motivated companies and people all start shouting in caps . But when the storm passes ( usually within a day ), businesses go back to normal . Companies who have successfully implemented software and services on the public cloud are creating competitive advantages over those that are not . Noise is just noise .
4 . Study the post-mortem from the cloud provider . More importantly , study the lessons learned from the companies who survived the outage and those who did not . Each hiccup will make both the cloud provider and its customers stronger if we all learn from it .
5 . Keep calm and cloud on !
SPRING 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 9