The Illusion of Multi-Cloud Providers
(3 Min Read) How SaaS breaks the best multi-cloud strategy
We have an illusion of multi-cloud providers. From the customer's point of view, there is only one cloud. When it's down, there is a disruption of service. CrowdStrike (July 2024) is a perfect example; there will be many more. CrowdStrike outage impacted Microsoft, which impacted businesses that had Microsoft cloud exposure.
Software companies have combined in-house tech with external SaaS providers for the last decade.
When deploying in-house tech, companies can pick their favorite cloud provider from 13 prominent cloud providers available to deploy their applications.Â
However, the moment a company buys a SaaS service, it becomes exposed to the risks associated with the cloud provider on which the SaaS service runs.
Today, building any application requires integrating multiple SaaS applications. For example, an AI startup today will use Google Suite for business, Zoom for Meetings, AWS for deploying applications, OpenAI for LLMs, and Stripe for billing. This is a lean stack, but now the AI startup is exposed to GCloud, AWS, Azure, and OCI.
For the customer of AI Startup, they can expect an outage if any one of these cloud providers goes down. So, from the customer's point of view, there is a cloud outage, and it doesn't matter which cloud provider has it.
Now, an engineering solution to this is to do a multi-cloud strategy. This sounds good on paper, but unless you decide to build every SaaS service in-house and then deploy them on multi-cloud for redundancy, it won't work. And even if it did, the cost will eat your business alive.
In reality, 99.9% of startups, small, mid-size, and some large companies don't have the option of using a multi-cloud. It's just an illusion.
Can you build an application that is multi-cloud and resilient?
It's hard and honestly an overkill for most applications.Â
All cloud providers have exceptional SLAs, and outages like this are far apart and few enough to justify any multi-cloud strategy.
There are exceptions to the above. Any life-critical tech deployed in hospitals, airplanes, etc., must have a proper multi-cloud strategy. And in those cases, the cost is worth it.
While I haven't had an opportunity to work on such critical projects yet, I designed a resilient multi-cloud strategy as a thought exercise. Maybe I will write a post about it someday. Please reach out if you have done so or would like to exchange notes.
The reason for writing this post is to remind us that we live in a connected world. In the future, if you are designing cloud applications with a multi-cloud strategy, be aware that it may be overkill and not serve its purpose, as there is only one cloud as far as the customer is concerned.
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IMO, multi-cloud doesnt make sense in 99.9% of the cases, as it defeats the idea of cost optimized solutions, brings in immense complexity, complex operations, additional overhead of multi-cloud management.
Its only practical for an application that can suffer no downtime, irrespective of the scale of failure and money as no-objective, because application failover across cloud, app stack setup for different cloud components will take large effort and cost.
Most common selling point for Multi-cloud strategy is DR, but, with each cloud increasing zones in each region, a region failure has never happend, hence, it make it less and less of a point as time goes on. Making application multi-region will itself suffice. Anything above that is simply over-kill for 99.9%.
.1% of those applications may be Global Infra backbone!