Mono Clouds vs Multi-Clouds & Hybrid Clouds
What Amazon Web Services has done is truly remarkable. Over the better part of fifteen years they have built a business with an annual run rate in excess of $45B. Underpinning that remarkable growth is storage – specifically S3, launched back in 2006. S3 revolutionized the storage industry and the S3 API is now the standard in the cloud, replacing the POSIX API and marking the beginning of the end for file and block. At this point, AWS is the dominant provider of public cloud infrastructure as a service, dwarfing offerings from the likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
AWS likes to remind analysts that they are just getting started and that they have just scratched the surface of the overall available market. This is true in more ways than one – and behind the code words of “we have a ton of growth opportunities…” lies an uncomfortable truth – that AWS, barring significant changes, will pin their growth hopes to the public cloud - leaving the door open to those companies that can operate in a multi-cloud world.
First off, let’s define the cloud. The “cloud” can exist on prem, at the edge, on a Kubernetes distro, or yes, in the public cloud. The cloud is a mentality, not a place. The cloud is a collection of technologies, a way of approaching the challenges of scale, security, performance and resiliency. It has nothing to do with location.
