News out in mid-February reported that after a seven-year migration to the cloud, Netflix had moved the rest of its video streaming to the AWS cloud. The poster child for AWS, some might think that Netflix has adopted a one-size-fits-all cloud strategy. But, let’s be completely clear, Netflix isn’t 100% running on AWS. Netflix is also using Google cloud storage for some archiving and continues to use a data center to run and manage its DVD business according to Fortune.
Cloud benefits are clear, but each cloud is different.
The key characters of AWS at its core are the “Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its S3 storage service. However, it’s constantly adding more services, from Amazon Machine Learning and AWS IoT to QuickSight and Kinesis Firehose,” according to TechRadar. It offers pay-as-you-go bandwidth pricing, extra features and SaaS.
Microsoft Azure is gaining momentum using its might and enterprise relationships to potentially catch up with AWS. iCorps says, “Designed for the modern business, the flexible Azure cloud platform allows small and medium sized businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications by leveraging the power of Microsoft’s global network of datacenters. The flexibility provides businesses with both Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities. Azure is easily integrated with existing IT environments which allows businesses to leverage the power and scalability of a hybrid cloud IT infrastructure.”
“When it comes to performance and networks, nobody can compete with Google Cloud Platform, so the pay-as-you-go trend ought to allow them to dominate the public cloud business,” according to TechRadar, but it is struggling because its go-to-market plans are not up to par. However, speaking highly of Google TechRadar continued that Google Cloud Platform, which integrates perfectly with Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL, is used by Snapchat, TiVo, Citrix, Ubisoft and Costco. It’s behind AWS on features, but is expected to catch up in the next few years. Google mostly has its eye on the banking industry, which is yet to embrace the public cloud.
Then you also have IBM picking up steam.
The point here is that each of these cloud platforms have advantages for each part of IT infrastructure.
What’s a Cloud Service Provider to Do?
We know it is tough going head-to-head with the big three (four if you include IBM), but that’s where we believe cloud service providers and telcos need to adjust their strategy. Companies are looking to hybrid clouds to deliver benefits across their business – put archiving in one place, disaster recovery in another. Cloud service providers have an opportunity to offer this value added insight, but they also need to give customers access to these clouds. This is where a multi-cloud capability becomes important.
David Linthicum, senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners, a consulting firm and cloud software provider in Boston advised to look for three families of cloud tools: Third-party cloud service and API governance tools; provider-native governance and management tools; and third-party cloud management platforms, or cloud brokers. He says:
“A cloud management platform should provide an integrated tool suite that helps organizations automate management across public and private clouds. The platform should eliminate the need for vendor- or service-specific interfaces, providing a single pane of glass for hybrid or multi-cloud management whose employer sells a cloud administration and governance tool.”
Introducing Flexiant Concerto
Perfectly aligned to Linthicum’s suggestion, Flexiant Concerto is the simple solution to multi cloud workload management and portability. With Concerto, organizations have access to one single pane of glass that is the fastest way to deploy and automate applications consistently across multiple clouds. It helps organizations avoid vendor lock in so they can use whatever cloud is right – because after all some clouds suit some jobs better than others.
If you are attempting to run a multi-cloud environment and working on your plan, have a look at Flexiant Concerto – and build it as part of your consistent plan for the cloud. At disruptive pricing, we know you’ll love it.
