Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Strategies for navigating multicloud decisions and difficulties (ENT217)

Summary

• Tom Godden, an enterprise strategist at AWS, discusses multicloud strategies.
• Multicloud is defined as using more than one cloud service provider for primary workloads, excluding SaaS products.
• Eight best practices for multicloud are shared:
  1. Pursue multicloud only for business reasons, such as mergers and acquisitions or leveraging differentiated capabilities.
  2. Be mindful of multicloud myths, such as everyone is doing it, it helps avoid lock-in, improves availability, and provides pricing advantages.
  3. Have a clear strategy and governance to support multicloud decisions.
  4. Applications should be contiguous and self-contained within a single cloud.
  5. Applications should remain with their transactional data to avoid increased costs and compliance issues.
  6. Containers are beneficial but don't solve all multicloud challenges.
  7. Maintain a single Cloud Center of Excellence for consistency and governance.
  8. Keep security as a top priority, leveraging tools for a single pane of glass and consistent policies.
• AWS recommends a primary cloud strategy for simplicity, focus, and risk mitigation, allowing for deeper leverage of differentiating capabilities.
• AWS provides tools and resources to manage hybrid and multicloud environments effectively.

Insights

• The push towards multicloud is often driven by business needs rather than technical desires, with mergers and acquisitions being a common catalyst.
• Despite common beliefs, multicloud strategies can introduce more complexity, risk, and cost, rather than providing the anticipated benefits of flexibility, availability, and cost savings.
• AWS advocates for a primary cloud strategy, emphasizing mastery of one cloud provider's capabilities to drive innovation and value.
• The use of containers, while beneficial for application portability, does not address all the complexities of multicloud environments.
• Security becomes more challenging in multicloud scenarios due to multiple security models and the need for consistent policies across different platforms.
• AWS offers a suite of tools to assist with multicloud management, including AWS System Manager, AWS Config, CloudWatch, and AWS Security Lake, among others.
• Organizations are encouraged to have a clear and firm understanding of their multicloud strategy, with well-defined governance and change management processes to prevent sprawl and chaos.
• The presentation underscores the importance of aligning multicloud strategies with business objectives and not succumbing to industry hype or misconceptions.