Even though the cloud ecosystem has evolved a great deal over the last decade, it’s still a common belief that one single cloud provider can meet all your needs. And yet, sooner or later, this hyper-dependence fostered by the cloud giants will have significant consequences in terms of strategy. This will cause your evolution and innovation to stall, while your clients will keep asking for more control over the sovereignty of their data.

Nowadays, open standards and open source practices pave the path for the multi-cloud. At Scaleway, as the leading alternative multi-cloud provider, we are convinced that this is only the beginning of the adventure.

Over the years, the uses and expectations of your technical teams have evolved:

• From storage to sovereignty – data storage is now inextricably linked to the topic of sovereignty, and compliance with American or Asian extraterritorial legislation is a major strategic issue
• From user to developer experience – a dedicated interface, 24/7 support, unlimited knowledge via a community, etc.
• From elasticity at all costs to find the balance between client guarantees and environmental impact. We are referring, of course, to our collective and shared responsibility for the environmental footprint of the digital industry, today and for the years to come

For years, the dominant providers have implemented a rather efficient acquisition and retention strategy by leading us to believe that a single cloud can meet all your needs.

This hyper-dependent strategy is working, which is unfortunate, as it will have a direct impact on your business in the medium to long term:

• Technical recruitment is limited to niche experts
• Predicting visible, and more often than not, hidden costs become impossible
• You are billed an excessive amount for data extraction, which might make you think twice about migrating to another provider
• Certifications become a never-ending nightmare
• Architectural dependence makes reversibility impossible
• Support is more expensive than efficient

Whether you choose an on-premise or a hybrid cloud model, the ideal solution that preserves your independence is the multi-cloud.

You might be using Github (Azure), Google Docs (GCP), together with your infrastructure hosted by AWS or Scaleway; meaning the multi cloud is already part of your daily lives.

Using the multi cloud on a larger scale is just the same if you adopt the right approach – the point is not to create a full backup of your applications with other providers.

A good multi-cloud strategy will allow you to benefit from the most relevant services offered by different cloud providers in order to build an efficient, resilient, and flexible architecture that meets your business needs, and improves your developers’ efficiency and experience.

There’s fierce debate surrounding the multi-cloud. Some will tell you that deploying a product across several regions, or even AZs, with one single cloud provider is complicated enough as it is. So why make it worse by adding more providers? The answer is – because the tables have turned. Nowadays, the obstacles are falling one by one, thanks to open source, and this strategy clearly has the most advantages including:

• Decreasing provider lock-in
• Benefitting from the best services each cloud provider has to offer
• Reducing infrastructure costs
• Developing redundant architectures with a real competitive advantage to motivate and empower your teams
• Making recruitment easier by looking for non-specialized profiles

Now that you know all the arguments, there are three possible outcomes:

1. You are already leveraging the services of several providers, but you want to benefit from all these advantages to the fullest
2. You are currently using an on-premise or hybrid approach, and now you want to move on to a multi-cloud strategy
3. Or you either think all of this is just nonsense, or you simply don’t believe what you just read. In this case, we would like to hear about your reservations

If one of the first two fits your case, then the next step for you is to analyze your infrastructure to find out what works and what doesn’t, and define the areas of improvement. All this should help you determine your next move.

The cloud has evolved a great deal over the last decade, and the once binary choice of “on premise, using self-managed servers” versus “public cloud with servers managed by a dedicated provider” has become far more complex.

Open standards and open source pave the way for the multi cloud. And, at Scaleway, the leading alternative multi-cloud provider, we are convinced that we are only at the beginning of the adventure.

Download the white paper