Apply a variety of cloud services it advantages to discard simplicity?

If the main reason for getting into the cloud is to reduce the complexity of deploying, managing, and maintaining applications, why are many cloud customers running multiple clouds?

Cloud Management service provider Rightscale says 87% of the customer cloud use cases from the company are running more than one cloud type and are more than one cloud service provider.

The most common uses of multiple clouds include providing high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery. At the same time, in addition to the public cloud, Rightscale's customers have also deployed pre-custom (on-premises) and managed private cloud or hybrid cloud.

Rightscale customers use the company's MyCloud service to support Amazon Web Service, DataPipe, IDC Frontier, Logicworks, Rackspace, and SoftLayer. In addition, Rightscale and private cloud software providers Citrix Cloudstack, Eucalyptus Bae, and OpenStack open source cloud computing projects are working together.

This does not necessarily mean that Rightscale sees a clear trend, one analyst said. After all, a variety of cloud management is Rightscale's specialty, their data is not independent verifiable.

"If you are preparing to use Rightscale, you may want to manage multiple cloud strategies," said Kyle Hilgendorf, Gartner's chief research analyst.

Analysts from the two major analysis companies said their company did not track the use of multiple clouds. But some companies do use this approach.

Whether it's a good idea to deploy a variety of clouds, it all depends on your point of view.

"I understand that a large health care provider uses nine kinds of clouds," Tom Nolle said he was the president of cloud consulting firm Cimi, "but they did it because they were testing, and after the final coordination there could be up to two providers, most of them using a variety of cloud customers who would choose a provider." ”

"We told the client ' you don't want to have a variety of providers, unless you don't do it in any way, '" Nolle adds.

However, some allow customers to want or need to use different cloud providers to target specific use cases, as Devops,michael Crandell explains, he is Rightscale's CEO and co-founder.

In fact, over the years, some companies have wanted to use a variety of clouds as a way of avoiding field lock-in, providing additional backup and recovery alternatives.

"The concept of developing multiple cloud strategies means finding the lowest-cost products from a variety of cloud vendors," said Greg Arnette, the CTO of the Data Management Web services company Sonia. "But many positive breakthroughs require the ability to successfully run a single Reference Architecture software stack across multiple clouds," Arnette added.

For example, the Apache Deltacloud Project supports a variety of cloud application interfaces (APIs). The current version is the 1.5,apache Software Foundation top-level project (TLP) Deltacloud supports very cloudy APIs, including VMware vsphere, Eucalyptus, Red Hat rhev-m, Microsoft Windows Azure , Rackspace, Terremark, Amazon elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)