
The S3 outage or: How you can learn to stop worrying and love the multi-cloud - anandr2013
https://blog.hasura.io/the-amazon-s3-outage-and-why-you-shouldnt-be-too-pally-with-your-provider-83fbc2353c93#.i77559hlj
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jedberg
Multi-cloud is a pipe dream. It's only slightly worse than hybrid cloud, which
is also terrible.

Sure, you could use multiple clouds for a couple of small things, but it's all
about the data.

To properly do multi-cloud (or hybrid cloud), you need to have the right data
in the right place at the right time, or you need to have all your data in
both places at all times.

The latter will cost you a fortune to maintain. Netflix does it across regions
because their cost of operations, including keeping multiple copies of all the
data, is lower than the cost of downtime, but that isn't likely to apply to
most people.

The former can only work if you are _really_ disciplined about keeping the
right data in the right place, or if you have a data abstraction layer that is
smart enough to put the right data in the right place at the right time (I'm
not aware of the existence of such a product or that anyone is even working on
such a thing).

The other problem with multi-cloud is that your software has to be built to
the lowest common denominator. In other words, you can only use features that
all your providers provide, again unless you go back to having software smart
enough to do the right thing in the right place at the right time.

It's a nice thought but I think we're years away from viable multi-cloud.

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dsandip
Agree with most of the points you made. I remember the amount of effort my
team in an ad-tech co. spent distributing load across multiple
providers/regions to bring down latency and add redundancy. The larger point
is that the ecosystem needs to enable this by product-ifying this (a data
abstraction layer that is smart enough to put the right data in the right
place at the right time).

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jedberg
I agree, there needs to be a product for this to work.

So far that product doesn't exist and isn't even a twinkle in someone's eye as
far as I know. Everyone is focusing on "running the same infrastructure
everywhere" but I haven't seen anyone focus on putting the right data in the
right place.

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anandr2013
Hi, this is the author of the post. I would love to hear your opinions or war
stories about building infra or provider agnostic applications.

