[Fumtumi]

There are not a lot of those companies which are that big.

You also might not want to manage that many it experts for your infrastructure or you are not able to get them.

Also if your companies product is very technical, i would argue that those companies are much better equiped doing it by themselfs then others.

Nonetheless, it also doesn't need to be all or nothing. You can easily combine a MultiCloud approach.

Build only the stuff which is easy to build and costs a lot on cloud yourself. I would say Buildsystems or compute instances are good candidates.

Like i could imagine putting netflix authentication system on a cloud provider while doing the compute stuff in my own data center and building the CDN myself.

[aaronblohowiak]

> Nonetheless, it also doesn't need to be all or nothing. You can easily combine a MultiCloud approach.

There may be reasons to go multicloud but ease isn’t one of them. You double your infra support overhead (or more likely, half its quality) and have a “least common denominator” experience.

The natural tendencies of large organizations is a diffusion of investment but the cheapest costs frequently come from a concentration of investment.

[Fumtumi]

Bigger you are bigger the differences between teams and products and projects.

You can leverage the high quality network infrastructure from Google while using your own DC for Compute Heavy Load.

Use Azure for your Windows specific workloads.

Go with AliCloud in China.

You need to be big enough so that running it yourself is doable with a certain amount of quality. Which does imply many teams and workloads.

[aaronblohowiak]

My employer does have a luxury of focus in its product offering, though we do have a moderately heterogeneous approach in development, certainly compared to many of the peers that operate at similar scale.

Heterogeneity in compute location has a multiplicative effect on accounting, security, capacity management, network management and is dilutive in terms of expertise -- instead of being able to justify the worlds leading experts in one system, you now need more staffing to cover a wider surface area (and they all need to have collaboration overhead to ensure they arent working at cross-purposes in strategy or tactic.)

I think this belief in marginal benefit from "right tool for the job" is a local-optimization where the costs of coordination and overhead are not borne locally and so are generally undervalued/discounted.

My employer runs on a single cloud provider, but -- do to its scale and closeness to core competency of our business -- we do operate our own CDN infrastructure, and this is a decision I happen to agree with. As a result of this division, I am acutely aware of the impact it can have on an engineering organization and only in certain specialized use-cases would advise considering DIY or multi-cloud.

[Fumtumi]

You also need to be on MultiCloud if you do not operate stuff on yourself so you are in a better negotiation position.

Or so that you are not dependend on only one.

[aaronblohowiak]

I hear this sentiment repeated frequently, but I’ve never heard multicloud as leverage actually getting a better deal than an exclusivity deal. If you have a different experience I’d love to connect and learn more - email in my profile.

[Spooky23]

There are lots of entities that are big enough. Given that the cloud stacks change from time to time, you don't reduce your need for engineers and other SMEs -- in some cases you need more.

I would say as someone who supports lots and lots of apps that cloud services are usually financial winners in a SaaS perspective and in a rapid growth scenario. Nobody can deliver Exchange cheaper than Microsoft. My team stood up apps for covid related activity for 20-40% of the cost and more importantly type than services under our organizations control.

That said, for what I would call "base load" scenarios, in many scenarios it's exactly the opposite.