[toiletduck]

Writing Terraform is easy - having it work after six month of features being delivered, the cloud provider evolving, and working with all your other microservices, isn't particularly. Assuming you can do that and just change a few lines to redeploy in a new cloud environment (imagine that including GKE to EKS) seems naive.

[scarface74]

On another note, in the list of top ten things that will add business value and either make the company money or save the company money where does “being cloud agnostic rate”?

What competent CTO would go through a migration from one provider to another on a whim? The chance of regression and business interruption is too high and the benefits too low to make it worth it if you’re at any type of scale.

[solidasparagus]

At a certain scale, being cloud agnostic is actually very financially beneficial. The negotiating leverage leads to substantially better private pricing deals with your cloud provider.

[scarface74]

At a certain scale are you really going to move your entire infrastructure over to another provider? The time, migration cost, and business risks are usually not worth it.

The time you’re spending migrating, testing, validating for correctness and often compliance is time you’re not spending on creating business value. On top of that, you’ve migrated all of the practices from being at a colo without any of the time to market , lower headcount, and flexibility or availability that you get from using native cloud services.

You’re investing time and not taking into account any of the opportunity cost. Businesses are so dependent on vendors these days - from payroll, to Office Suites, to database vendors, to even their physical facilities it’s silly to optimize for one part of your infrastructure at the expense of other opportunities in the rare case that you might change vendors.

Do you also have a migration plan for all of your other dependencies? Are all of your documents in an open source format? What about your project management system? Your AD? Your device management system? Are all your desktops running Linux? Are you using Microsoft Exchange? What are you using for time tracking? Expense reimbursement? SSO? Alerting and monitoring?

[solidasparagus]

When your cloud costs reach the high hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year, it is worth it. At that point you probably want to run your infrastructure across cloud providers anyway.

[scarface74]

At that point, you’re going to need the in house expertise anyway and you would probably be better off managing your own data center.

Even if you are “cloud agnostic”, at that size just your networking infrastructure, compliance, auditing, and data migration is going to cost a boatload of money and it would take years to save enough to make the migration worth it. Not to mention the retraining and risks that come from the migration.

You probably also have a few direct connections to the cloud provider.

[toiletduck]

Cloud agnostic in terms of using the best products from each service: sure. It makes sense to leverage the strengths of each cloud provider.

Having all your infra written with shim layers to move it freely between providers sounds like the scale you need to start thinking about hosting your own "cloud provider" or stop using public cloud.