Multi-Cloud Consumption Types and Reasons.

I am looking at statistics across tens of thousands of AWS, Azure and GCE instances Cloudaware manages. 90% of our customers have workloads at least in AWS and Azure and 70% have workloads in Google Cloud as well. I will share exact proportions in another post. Today, I specifically want to focus two styles of cloud consumption.

Different Applications — Different Clouds

This is the most common consumption style especially within enterprises. Many of our customers have 50–70 AWS Accounts and 100–200 Azure subscriptions and maybe a dozen GCE projects. But these are different applications, different teams, business units, etc. The only thing in common across these deployments is the payor.

Above style of consumption is very common within large global enterprises where cloud consumption matured independently across different business units and divisions within the company.

A lot of enterprises wake up to find themselves multi-cloud through acquisitions. Overnight a AWS shop has as much spend in Azure or Google. This can be quite a challenge for security and compliance teams who have gone through cloud security training and fine tuned their tech chops for a specific cloud provider to all of a sudden have to deal with a completely new cloud provider.

One Application — Different Clouds

Now this is something of a BigFoot of cloud computing, according to our data less than 1% of our customer applications go outside of the boundaries of a single cloud provider. However we do see our customers adopting container services offerings such as AWS ECS and Azure Containers. At the CMDB level we also see substantial growth in use of Docker at the OS level.

Obviously running single workload across many different clouds is not for everyone. There has to be a pretty good justification for doing so. And so far we see cost as the main factor. It is hard to tell for now whether increased complexity is worth marginal savings one might derive from this approach.

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