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Agree with the sentiment. Many enterprises got really excited about multi-cloud really fast but then gave up once they faced the harsh reality of increased complexity (and, as a consequence, cost and time). People tend to grossly overestimate the actual size of the ‘common denominator’. On the face of it services look almost identical (every cloud has compute, blob storage, block storage, etc.), in reality, there are so many subtle differences between analogous services (API, pricing model, failure modes, performance, security models) that the support and operation cost easily more than doubles. So even in large enterprises where there is a top-down edict to ‘be multi-cloud’ actual BU/team silos tend to stick to one or the other provider. The other often overlooked aspect is that clouds offer bulk discounts (I’ve seen up to 40%) for customers that spend many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but one can only get this if they stick to one provider. In other words, the economics of multi-cloud doesn’t scale well. Kubernetes strives to be the common layer, but cross-cloud deployments tend to be very convoluted and non-trivial. They require a lot of manual work, tons of expertise in different domains (networking, security), greatly increase management overhead, and introduce funny new failure modes.
In addition, Kubernetes is just one piece of the puzzle. After one is done with Kubernetes, they still need to figure out their user-facing services for launching containers, provisioning and managing databases, message queues, analytics, and machine learning pipelines. Now compare that entire ordeal with clicking a few buttons (or writing several pages of Terraform) and having everything setup and ready to go in an instant and on-demand. Yes, you do have to tie yourself to a single cloud, give up some degrees of freedom, and use extremely high-margin proprietary services (like Kinesis instead of Kafka) but it’s so so much easier, faster and cheaper (at least in the short to medium term). To answer the original question (and sorry for going off on a tangent), I haven’t seen any company actually succeed with multi-cloud (my sample is 100+ SMBs and large enterprises). Even extremely tech-savvy and sophisticated companies like Twitter (with their shift to GCP) tend to think of all this as something that doesn’t necessarily need to be built anymore and should be bought instead. What I do see all the time, is companies trying to figure out a way to marry their existing on-prem and (single) cloud provider setups. It is still a struggle though, and will probably always be to a certain extent. Edit: typos |