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Amazon employee here so I am biased. While multi-cloud might give you more redundancy, it: a) prevents you from using any of the custom features that many each

Amazon employee here so I am biased. While multi-cloud might give you more redundancy, it: a) prevents you from using any of the custom features that many each service great (for instance lambda, aurora, dynamodb or in the case of google cloud, some of their ML tech). Might as well use on-prem if you’re not going to using AWS/Azure/GSuite feature on top of IaaS b) requires you to set up multiple alarms, logs, metrics, on different providers which can themselves be the source of bugs c) doesn’t provide you much more availability/redundancy them simply using multiple regions d)while this may give you long term negotiating power, you will likely just save more money with long term exclusive contracts. The DOD will also likely never be 100% migrated to AWS and there will probably be more contracts

webmaven 8y ago
> d)while this may give you long term negotiating power, you will likely just save more money with long term exclusive contracts. Uh, This would be true, if one expected prices (and technology) to remain stable, but since that isn't the case, maintaining re-negotiating power is quite a bit more advantageous than you imply.
- julianozen 8y ago
  Yeah not sure. I think it depends on the contracts. Maintaining infrastructure on 3 cloud providers that don’t work the same is costly. All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to provide accurate capacity forecasts and make long term commitments. And the while the “technology gets cheaper” argument is true, I believe it is generally understood that while AWS/Azure/Google can use this trend at the scale they operate at (and then pass the savings to the customers), most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend.
  - webmaven 8y ago
    > Maintaining infrastructure on 3 cloud providers that don’t work the same is costly. Maintaining the ability to move between providers is not at all the same as maintaining your systems on all three simultaneously. > All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to [...] make long term commitments. Sure. But the question is, at the end of that commitment, are you locked in to that provider by the cost of having to redevelop for a different provider (which gives your existing provider an unearned pricing advantage), or can you switch providers because you had the foresight to make sure your deployments were portable? > most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend. Sure, because most cloud customers are small and are drawn by the prospect of not maintaining infrastructure at all (in other words, they're actually SaaS customers by preference), and the non-portability of G-Suite's integration with GCP as compared with Office 365's integration with Azure is relatively immarterial compared to the non-portability between G-Suite and Office 365. But (right now, at least) at the scale where you are for example selecting a cloud orchestration solution, going for the one that provides better portability between different providers with an abstraction layer doesn't really impose additional costs (because you'll need to develop internal expertise in whatever solution you choose).

webmaven 8y ago

> d)while this may give you long term negotiating power, you will likely just save more money with long term exclusive contracts. Uh, This would be true, if one expected prices (and technology) to remain stable, but since that isn't the case, maintaining re-negotiating power is quite a bit more advantageous than you imply.

julianozen 8y ago
Yeah not sure. I think it depends on the contracts. Maintaining infrastructure on 3 cloud providers that don’t work the same is costly. All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to provide accurate capacity forecasts and make long term commitments. And the while the “technology gets cheaper” argument is true, I believe it is generally understood that while AWS/Azure/Google can use this trend at the scale they operate at (and then pass the savings to the customers), most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend.
- webmaven 8y ago
  > Maintaining infrastructure on 3 cloud providers that don’t work the same is costly. Maintaining the ability to move between providers is not at all the same as maintaining your systems on all three simultaneously. > All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to [...] make long term commitments. Sure. But the question is, at the end of that commitment, are you locked in to that provider by the cost of having to redevelop for a different provider (which gives your existing provider an unearned pricing advantage), or can you switch providers because you had the foresight to make sure your deployments were portable? > most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend. Sure, because most cloud customers are small and are drawn by the prospect of not maintaining infrastructure at all (in other words, they're actually SaaS customers by preference), and the non-portability of G-Suite's integration with GCP as compared with Office 365's integration with Azure is relatively immarterial compared to the non-portability between G-Suite and Office 365. But (right now, at least) at the scale where you are for example selecting a cloud orchestration solution, going for the one that provides better portability between different providers with an abstraction layer doesn't really impose additional costs (because you'll need to develop internal expertise in whatever solution you choose).