Debunking the Cloud Agnostic Delusion
Dirk Alshuth
VP of Global Marketing I emma - Cloud Management Platform I Strategic B2B Marketing I UiPath Alumni
The cloud is indispensable for modern businesses, but how they approach their cloud strategy is up for debate. Every now and then, new terms, buzzwords, and acronyms pop up in the already crowded cloud thesaurus. For the uninitiated, each novel term and acronym might seem like a groundbreaking concept, tempting them to hop on the bandwagon. While some of these concepts and strategies effectively solve existing challenges, others end up creating new problems in trying to address mere hypotheticals. Cloud agnosticism, in its pure and true form, can very well belong to the latter.
On the surface, it sounds like a promising idea — no more vendor lock-ins, ultra-flexibility, multi-cloud redundancy, and finally, negotiating leverage. So, why don’t all organizations simply become cloud agnostic? Basically, it’s like telling someone on the verge of a panic attack to simply “not panic”. “Not panicking” requires complex psychomedical intervention. Likewise, there’s nothing simple about becoming cloud agnostic.
Cloud Agnostic is Not Multi-cloud
Cloud agnosticism, a rather niche architectural approach for very specific considerations and business needs, is unfortunately often mistaken or used interchangeably with multi-cloud, which most organizations deploy by default anyway. Multi-cloud suggests a best-of-breed approach in which businesses, instead of being tied to a single cloud platform, use the most suitable tools for particular tasks, regardless of the platform. It allows you to leverage the best features of each cloud platform.
Cloud agnosticism, on the other hand, is the ability to move workloads seamlessly between different providers. The idea behind cloud agnostic development and techniques is to grant organizations the freedom to choose where and when they want to deploy particular workloads. All applications and resources are designed to be platform-independent, so they can be deployed across multiple clouds or shifted seamlessly, as and when needed, to competing providers.
The Hype: Why Cloud Agnostic is Appealing
Unexpected price hikes or service/performance downgrades aren’t unheard of in the cloud computing market. Google, for instance, has a reputation for raising its prices or monetizing previously free services. More recently, Microsoft also quietly capped OneDrive’s formerly unlimited data storage for businesses. Sudden shifts in policy or pricing can catch businesses off guard, who then have little choice but to comply with the vendor’s terms since they’re too dependent on their services.
Cloud agnostic architecture removes this dependency by strictly forbidding the use of any proprietary tools, technologies, or services that can tie organizations or their workloads to a specific vendor. Instead, it embraces vendor-neutral platforms and tools, like Kubernetes for container orchestration and Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and management. If the pricing, SLAs, or coverage of your CSP don’t work for you anymore, you can simply switch to the next one... Well, ideally, at least!
The Reality Check: Why Cloud Agnostic is an Illusion
As appealing as it sounds, here’s why cloud agnosticism falls short of its promise:
Vendor Lock-outs
Cloud agnosticism restricts organizations to the lowest common denominator of cloud services. It means that most services beyond the bare basics of the cloud - disks, networks, and servers - become inaccessible to you. This means you’re stuck having to deploy your own load balancers, object stores, databases, monitoring tools, service meshes, and more. You’re also solely responsible for redundancy, scalability, and performance optimization. You can end up running the cloud just like an on-premise datacenter. And while you’re reinventing the wheel, your competitors, having offloaded the operational overhead to the CSPs, could be redirecting their focus and resources to what really matters to their core business.
Resource Intensiveness
Self-managing various aspects of cloud infrastructure demands dedicated resources, both in terms of human expertise and time. CSPs have already invested heavily in creating affordable tools and services to optimize and simplify cloud operations for their tenants. However, cloud agnosticism requires expensive tooling and intricate customizations to ensure seamless interoperability. You will also have to invest further resources in training your team to acquire specialized skills in cloud agnostic management and orchestration.
Suboptimal Outcomes
Despite all the pains and lost opportunities, migrating between clouds will never truly be seamless. It can still take days and weeks, with numerous bumps on the way. Sure, you do not have to refactor everything from scratch. But for most organizations, following the cloud-native principles of vendor neutrality and interoperability through cloud agnostic tools, abstractions, and standardized APIs and protocols is enough for maintaining the agnosticism they really need without compromising the optimizations and cost savings of cloud-specific solutions and services.
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The emma Platform Bridges the Gap Between Cloud Agnostic and Cloud Native
With the emma platform, you get the best of both worlds — being vendor agnostic while still enjoying proprietary and progressive tools. You can move your workloads seamlessly between different clouds, effectively achieving the agnosticism you need to support multi-cloud deployments. And the best thing is that the emma platform singlehandedly allows organizations to manage all aspects of their multi-cloud environment from a single location.
👉 Read the full blog and learn how the emma platform allows you to abstract away from platform-specific offerings while still utilizing their functionality and features
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