Cloud agnosticism – Part 1

An Introduction

Cloud agnosticism stems from the costs associated to cloud computing and vendor locking as discussed in a previous post on cloud computing economics and trends. An organization leveraging cloud service computing tends to witness a gradual increase in the TCO due to increased data, services, bandwidth and upselling (additional new services). This results in higher service delivery costs to the general public.

Hence, organizations needs to ensure that cloud computing assets are adequately governed and monitored to ensure that services are consumed as needed. Furthermore, avoiding vendor-lock solutions and promoting infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, allows organizations to adopt cloud agnosticism practices. This allows the organization to set-up cloud environments on other providers or infrastructure as needed in a short period of time, without affecting the service architecture.Such flexibility allows an organization to transition to a new vendor if pricing, availability or SLAs are better. Additionally, cloud agnosticism practices allow organization to implement a multi cloud architecture, whereby a service can run simultaneously on different cloud providers.

The adoption of cloud agnosticism can be achieved if a reference architecture is designed without any architectural dependencies on specific CSPs. Containerization is a software architecture built without any architectural dependency on specific CSPs. This architecture allows orchestration by CSPs, whilst retaining independence to run on different providers. Furthermore, containerization allows reduction in compute resources, hence reducing costs.

In the next part existing studies and solutions which organizations adopt to achieve cloud agnosticism are reviewed.