Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Different people have different challenges. For companies being built from scratch today, you get to pick your technologie

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Different people have different challenges. For companies being built from scratch today, you get to pick your technologies and providers as you see fit. In that case, I’ve always been sad when I see folks doing least-common denominator and excusing it via “multi cloud” or “no lock in”. I remind them that “you don’t need to pick GCP, but your biggest challenge will be not going out of business. Focus on that. If you end up with a lock-in problem and you’re successful, that’s a good problem to have”. However, there are many folks who end up in either a multi-cloud or at least hybrid cloud setup. Any existing enterprise with sufficient infrastructure is going to start their migration to cloud as a hybrid affair, because they aren’t just going to burn their equipment to the ground. Even companies “born in the cloud” eventually get larger and often acquire other companies. If the acquired company was on Azure but you’re an AWS shop, you are suddenly multicloud. If the acquired company is a serious enough fraction of your infrastructure, or it’s locked in economically via contracts, you have the same model as on-prem plus cloud. As with hybrid, some companies push themselves to get out of this state as quickly as possible. Others accept it as “we’ll always have bits and pieces everywhere”. It really depends on the company and their business values. Finally, heavily regulated industries often have dual-sourcing or “must be able to get off within 12 months” restrictions as an example. Those folks are kind of in the “must always be either multi loud or at least hybrid”, and really appreciate a consistent “universe”. tl;dr: you can impugn Craig’s motivation for creating the CNCF, but there are people and businesses that derive value from consistency and a theoretical ability to switch.