[ignoramous]

They're like Docker for DevOps?

> ...a common confusion is multi-cloud vs. multi-vendor services. The latter is way more common, especially at smaller companies. Tools like Terraform are often touted as "multi-cloud" and people ask questions like "Why would I use Terraform if I use only AWS?" And the easy answer to that is tools like Terraform allow you to manage anything with an API as code. For example: do you want to manage DNS, or CDN, or DBs, etc. (that maybe aren't on AWS) as code? Terraform gives you the way to learn one config language/workflow to make that happen, even if 100% of your compute is on one provider. From a non-technical standpoint, this helps your organization start learning non-vendor-specific tooling, which better prepares you from a human standpoint for the future noted above.

> I think the #1 value of multi-cloud is organizational: you build your core infra/app lifecycle processes (dev, build, deploy, monitor, etc.) around a technology-agnostic stance. As technologies shift, other clouds become important, new paradigms emerge, etc. your organization is likely more prepared to experience that change. This is something that is core to our ideology at HashiCorp, its point #1 in our Tao that I published 4 years ago! https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/the-tao-of-hashicorp

-mitchellh, https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/91afzz/why_multiclo...

[sharken]

Multi-cloud is a nice idea, but not for everyone.

Where i'm at it has been SQL Server for the last 12 years and now Azure for cloud services.

It's highly unlikely that will change for the next 10 years.

And almost equally unlikely that Terraform will be used instead of ARM templates and Bicep.

[urthor]

Cannot agree with this more.

Single cloud has a few extraordinary benefits for slow moving organizations.

Once you hang up the sign and declare "we are an xxx shop" it becomes an extraordinarily effective tool to drag unsophisticated employees and departments into the future.

"Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to" overcomes a LOT of internal barriers to technical change.

The biggest problems are never technology in large organizations, it's the humans beings anxiously protecting their overpaid managerial role. Single cloud is amazingly effective at improving the human factor.

At more sophisticated places with a bigger human appetite for innovation of course it's a different story.

[dragonwriter]

> "Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to" overcomes a LOT of internal barriers to technical change

“Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to” is a lot of internal barriers to technical change.

At least, that's what I see working in an public sector enterprise shop whose cloud transition started as involving a break from being a solid and conservative narrow Microsoft shop which is currently backsliding as that transition broadens and innovators at all levels (including the CTO that spearheaded it, who is departing for a CIO gig) move on or are marginalized.

[urthor]

I sympathize, but what is the obstacle standing in the way of "if it's on Azure why don't we just use it?"

That's often a moderately straightforward discussion.

[cyberpunk]

It makes very little sense. I mean, sure, maybe try to avoid vendor specific databases and use stuff like rds/managed cassandra/whatever vs Bigtable or dynamodb, but it's MUCH cheaper to lean in as hard as you can to one cloud provider and just pay for a month or three of consultants to move you if you ever actually want to than it is to build that in from the start.

k8s is a nice way to get there, if your k8s is running on gcp, aws, or azure it doesn't really impact your pipelines or process at all.

Things are harder at the bleeding edge, I'm working atm on a site that's all in on aws lambda with server less framework and aurora, kinesis and such, to the point where a migration would mean a rewrite tbh.. And that's alright for them, they're ok with their cloud partner.. And it's cheap too..

[thedougd]

It's not unrealistic to expect a stack that includes Azure, GitHub, Datadog, Okta, Pagerduty, and more for a single application. Terraform handles and ties them all together well with a single application focused configuration.

[Too]

Funny thing is Terraform isn't really cloud agnostic. I don't understand why this keeps coming up as a selling point all the time. Apart from the syntax of HCL and the concept of state-management. You still have to learn each vendors unique resource-types, which is like 10000 times more difficult than the underlying HCL language.

It's still a great product for lots of other reasons, just don't believe for one second it will help you move from AWS to Azure. It's almost like saying YAML is multi-vendor.

[technofiend]

This is true. But there are ways to hide that with one more layer. For instance the rackn guys just released an update to digital rebar that uses pipelines and brokers to stand up infrastructure using among other things terraform but the user just specs out what they want in simple profiles. Digital rebar supports aws, linode, digital ocean, etc. You still have to specify a few things unique to each cloud provider but the scripting for each is otherwise the same.