Is Multi-Cloud Where Cloud Market Heading?
Multi-cloud is not a very new concept but it gets more and more attention from both the cloud industry and the investment community. Take Google, for example, it has been promoting its multi-cloud solution, Anthos, since last year. Its contribution to the growth of GCP was highlighted multiple times during the recent earnings conference call and GS technology conference interview by both CFO Ruth Porat and CEO of Google Cloud Thomas Kurain respectively.
"We also saw a strong uptake of our multi-cloud Anthos offering." -- RP
"The benefit (of multi-cloud) to customers is twofold: 1) you get to train your organization on one technology; second, you get to manage in a consistent way across multiple cloud environments. And operationally from a security and monitoring point of view, that's a significant benefit." -- TK
"In a number of regulated industries like financial services in Europe, where the regulators are concerned about concentration risk, this technology gives people choice in how they can move workload across multiple platforms.....customers are choosing us for the freedom and portability that our multi-cloud technology offers..." -- TK
"We're bringing the same technology to a 5G network to transfer a 5G network from just being about bandwidth and connectivity to being an application delivery environment." -- TK
Thomas Kurian also emphasized the importance of multi-cloud for Google to expand its cloud total addressable market going forward. When asked what are his top priorities in the next 2 to 3 years, he reiterated that GCP is super committed to delivering the vision of multi-cloud: "...the reason we believe in that is that most large institutions, most government agencies cannot go and sign a contract where they're locked into a cloud provider. Before the technology that we invented and gave into open-source existed, you really had no choice. And so now we are committed to making that vision possible..."
The multi-cloud vision is essentially about using multiple clouds at once, thanks to the rise of containerization, supported by Container and Kubernetes. We will explain these overwhelming technical terms in more detail going forward, but the gist of containerization is to create a new middleware platform on top of existing public and private clouds to allow clients to move workloads to and from different clouds without the fear of "lock-in".
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It's interesting to us that GCP is advocating a multi-cloud approach as the proliferation of multi-cloud might commoditize the existing cloud services. It could significantly damage the pricing power of AWS, Azure, and GCP if users can shift workloads easily. Another ugly reality today is that it's still technically challenging to move between public clouds due to the lack of cross-cloud virtualization standards, among many other things. Intuitively the multi-cloud vision makes a lot of sense to us from users' perspective, we cannot wait to see if it will gain even more momentum as the cloud cycle matures further in the coming years.
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