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The Journey to Multi-cloud
How will enterprises evolve their high-value legacy applications to the cloud experience? Public cloud advocates say "migrate." Grizzled infrastructure pros know the poor risk/return ratio of migrations. Is there a modern approach to legacy modernization? Join us for a Crowdchat.
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#actionitemManaging AI RiskAI's impacts are hotly debated -- and usually poorly understood. What risks is AI presenting? And how must leaders address those risks? Let's CHAT!
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#actionitemMulticloud Data ProtectionMore cloud means more distributed data. More distributed data in a digital business means data protection is more strategic. What are the multicloud data protection imperatives? Join us for a Crowdchat.
Top Votes
Peter Burris
What will be the impact of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat on the journey to multicloud? https://www.crowdcha...

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Randy Arseneau
Sorry, gotta sit this one out. :)
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David Floyer
The IBM vision of an open source hybrid cloud stack and management is excellent, and very ambitious!
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Kurt Milne
OpenShift will soon support IBM cloud. Non of the OpenShift solutions support IBM cloud currently. Per my review of documentation.
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Eric Wright
I predict it will incrementally accelerate things. Not a 10x opportunity. There aren't too many 10x things left in the multicloud journey story.
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jameskobielus
IBM/Red Hat will dominate enterprise IT customers' on-ramp to the public cloud.
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Eric Wright
@discoposse the 10x opportunities are within the layers. Security, cost, and performance will be the battleground for orgs to properly keep on path to aggressive cloud adoption.
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David Floyer
!!
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Dave Vellante
https://wikibon.com/... - my take
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Sarbjeet Johal
It's great form IBM. For industry in general, net-net it won't have much effect, as some positive effects will be negated with negative effects as one key CSP-neutral vendor is taken out.
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jameskobielus
IBM/Red Hat will have one of the dominant K8s software and managed services platforms.
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Dave Vellante
I think this is a services deal for IBM - IBM has a captive base of legacy apps through its services business at which it can aim Red Hat offerings - imo it's why Ginni keeps stressing the deal is not backend loaded...
Peter Burris
How would you explain to a CEO the difference between hybrid cloud and multicloud? https://www.crowdcha...

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Stuart Miniman
@sarbjeetjohal hybrid tends to be public+private, multi = many and definitely needs to include SaaS, public and private options
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Stephen Pao
Multi-cloud generally refers to using multiple public cloud providers, where hybrid cloud generally refers to mixing private and public clouds.
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Randy Arseneau
Hybrid cloud is cooperative, mult-cloud is collaborative. Workloads and services are more "mobile" in a true MC environment, where as hybrid cloud is more focused on data mobility.
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Dave Vellante
hybrid cloud is achieving the same operating experience across #onprem & public #cloud workloads...multi-cloud is a symptom of #cloudcreep and is a cluster F if not managed properly. Ideally the two come together.
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Andrew Miller
There's overlap (or some people may see it that way and not worth arguing to much if they do). At core, hybrid is centered around on-premises + cloud(s) while multicloud is centered around cloud options (likely multiple or at least planning for multiple even if not yet)
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Bobby Allen
- Multi-cloud to me means that multiple execution venues are in play for your business / enterprise. Hybrid cloud = multi-cloud with orchestration and automation to move things between execution venues.
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Eric Wright
Hybrid implies some on-premises presence, usually IaaS/Private Cloud (yes...those exist). Multi-cloud is any IaaS/PaaS/CaaS adoption on two or more public clouds IMHO
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Bill Mew
Using original definitions: Hybrid is Public + Private, Multicloud is Public + Public +++
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Sarbjeet Johal
Hybrid cloud is mix of customer's private data center and off premise public and/or private cloud from a particular vendor. Multi cloud is mashup of public and/or private cloud from different vendors including on prem private cloud.
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David Floyer
Multi-cloud is where all the data lies in different clouds. "True Hybrid cloud" allows those multi-clouds to be integrated by enabling the movement of code and data between cloud instantiations, and execute the code.
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Bob Wambach
agree with @dvellante that hybrid is associated with spanning on-premises and public. multi-cloud is more expansive and may also include on-premises.
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Randy Arseneau
@BillMew This gets my vote for best "CEO friendly" metaphor. :)
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jameskobielus
"Hybrid cloud" extends your on-premises private-cloud assets (data, storage, compute, etc) through on-demand subscription access to resources in at least one public cloud. Multi-cloud" might use two or more clouds in a common application (eg AWS for ETL, Azure for BI).
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Sarbjeet Johal
@stu SaaS is alway assumed to to be multi cloud...
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Brad Parks
North South vs. East West. Hybrid could include tiers for app stacks or dev stages while Multi may ultimately be about the best venue for a given workload.
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Peter Burris
Is hybrid cloud an "app strategy" and multicloud a "platform strategy?"
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jameskobielus
Multi-cloud might involve a private cloud sharing data & workloads with two or more public clouds. A multi-cloud might be a federation on private clouds hubbed by a public cloud (eg B2B supply chain with managed SaaS hub).
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Ian Massingham
I could argue neither of these things really exist. Organizations are just doing what they've always done - choosing the best solution to solve a particular problem or exploit a particular opportunity.
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Ian Massingham
certain parts of the tech industry have an (unhelpful - in my opinion) urge to put labels on thing in order to align their products against these labels. In my experience customers rarely get up in the morning and think 'i need some multi-cloud'
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Stuart Miniman
@IanMmmm great point - users don't argue about the taxonomy - they use the solutions that they need. Need to beware that we don't continue to perpetuate silos of activity like was done in the past.
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jameskobielus
Usually, we understand "multi-cloud" at a particular interoperability level (eg moving VMs back and forth among two or more IaaS cloud services). But multi-cloud can also mix distinct IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings. Or interop diff IaaS with Kubernetes with serverless
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Ian Massingham
they are much more likely to say 'I need to solve problem X or Y' and work back from their to a solution. With enough diverse problems, you end up with multiple answers.
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Ian Massingham
@plburri
they are much more likely to say 'I need to solve problem X or Y' and work back from there to a solution. With enough diverse problems, you end up with multiple answers.
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Sarbjeet Johal
Migrations are multi-year journeys!
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Ellen Feaheny
honestly I think two-words are more confusion than worth, but hybrid cloud is about the app able to bridge betwn hybrid and saas... and multi-cloud is abt portability.

Why can't we just say multi-cloud == kubernetes-packaged so not so confusing to market?
Peter Burris
What priorities should CIOs focus on as businesses seek to modernize legacy applications with cloud technologies? https://www.crowdcha...

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Randy Arseneau
Usual suspects: cost, time to value, manageability, and investment protection.
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Bill Mew
Risk mitigation has to be one of the top priorities - Just ask TSB!
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Eric Wright
embrace automation. Build trust. The most successful teams that bring in DevOps processes and really get true velocity increase have both hight trust culture and broad use of automation. Let the machines to the work :)
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Eric Wright
@discoposse at the same time, this amplifies the need to adopt a DevSecOps approach. Security is an afterthought way more often than it should be.
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Dave Vellante
People, people, people...
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Randy Arseneau
@discoposse Agree wholeheartedly here. This also often requires a significant, and sometimes painful, re-skilling exercise as well.
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Sarbjeet Johal
1. Agility 2. Minimal Disruption to Operations 3. Well defined KPIs 4. Transformation Roadmap
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Stephen Pao
Depends on the maturity of the org in their journey to cloud. The biggest barriers are usually skill sets, so it's often best for those early in the journey to start with low-risk apps.
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Kurt Milne
enabling speed of feature iterations. Call it Feature Velocity. And not wasting money when moving to cloud.
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Dave Vellante
@BillMew and exit strategies as part of risk mitigation - i.e. if it ain't working how to I get out...
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Peter Burris
@BillMew TSB?
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Eric Wright
@dvellante bingo! Don't get caught out by moving your lock-in from one provider to another
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Bill Mew
Get the data architecture right before you modernize. e.g. in UK public sector we have depts with unique identifiers that are HNS number, national insurance number, driving licence number or passport number - a common data architecture will provide much value later
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Sarbjeet Johal
From doing more than 100 DC audits and several migrations + transformations many lessons were learned: biggest one: Move Apps as Is then Transform. Transform Phases -> Infra Led -> Process Led -> App Led.
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Dave Vellante
love this thread - great checklist comes out of this! #cloud #multicloud #CIO #CXO #cloudcomputing #roadmap
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David Floyer
@BillMew And a list of other large enterprises with extended outages and data losses!
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Brad Parks
Don't fall into an Ops-centric trap. Get Dev teams and Business units at the table day 1 to address people and process as much as tools and technology.
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jameskobielus
Focus on refactoring your application into distinct capabilities at a granularity you want to have the flexibility to upgrade, scale, secure, & manage independently of the full app stack going forward.
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Bobby Allen
- the most important question to focus on is which applications are "secret sauce" vs. offering no undifferentiated value. The second category should be outsourced physically or logically. The first category should be optimized and modernized.
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Peter Burris
@bjfjallen Great start! We start with the data since that probably is the "secret sauce."
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Bobby Allen
- Agreed. This is one of the areas I agree with @CTOadvisor on. It should start with your data management strategy. Another consideration is how important workload portability is to the CIO and business.
Peter Burris
Wikibon research suggests that enterprises are budgeting 2019 money to start evolving their high-value legacy applications toward a cloud operating model. What is your experience? https://www.crowdcha...

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Bob Wambach
Definitely see this. Especially driven by things like Windows Server 2008 EOS and SQL 2008 EOS. Microsoft providing great incentives to move to Azure.
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Eric Wright
absolute agreement. Field experiences I'm having can back this up. 2019 is bringing a lot of EOS/EOL conversations and enterprises know that building towards cloud models is a win even on-premises
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Randy Arseneau
Absolutely. Hear it, live it, dissect it every day.
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Stephen Pao
A lot of this is still "lift and shift" to gain cloud economics. Haven't as much move to really "cloud native" operating models - e.g., application rewrites to use "serverless."
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Bobby Allen
- Agreed. The first question customers are looking to answer is whethere there's a SaaS option that meets the spirit of the legacy applications requirements so they can "outsource" it and focus on business value vs. software development & infrastructure.
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David Floyer
For most enterprises this is an initial look at the tools and options for creating a hybrid cloud environment. The main players here are VMware, Microsoft Azure Stack and Oracle. They all have some True Hybrid Cloud capabilities.
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Sarbjeet Johal
They have been trying to to that for last 2-3 years, some brave should have moved SAP instances to cloud already. Mass migration will be a slow progression. Migrations are the messiest part of #cloud adoption.
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Eric Wright
attended a great IBM event in Toronto and one company shared a "cloud-native" transformation but were 100% on-prem. That was prep for moving to cloud and releasing the limits on their apps bound by traditional dev models
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Dave Vellante
Agree - the so called "fat middle" of the market is definitely moving because people understand they can't just keep throwing bodies at the problem.
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Kurt Milne
Agree - "Cloud native" is an application architecture, not a destination. Also - changes Operations people/process/tools.
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Randy Arseneau
@sarbjeetjohal I'd agree with this, although the tooling and services to accelerate this are evolving quickly.
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Eric Wright
seeing lots of lift & shift despite what some cloud purists and pundits have said in the past. There is a real value of bringing some workloads over and then adapting the operational model once there
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Bill Mew
This needs to be a pragmatic migration. Most of the new workloads are being developed as #cloudnative and most of the low hanging fruit that can be migrated easily has already been moved to the #cloud. Meaning that what is left is the challenging stuff
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Randy Arseneau
@steve_pao The rapid proliferation of containerization is driving this trend upward though, I'd opine.
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Sarbjeet Johal
When doing migrations, the first thing which must happen is Application Portfolio Analysis. Reason is that you ease into cloud consumption as your people and processes have to change as well. So go slow in the beginning. handle low hanging fruit while youu adapt
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Brad Parks
We've got dozens of large enterprises coming back around after having failed a DIY cloud management approach. They are finding the need to focus more on those apps and less on trying to be experts across platforms.
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Bob Wambach
wondering what other folks are seeing as priorities for legacy apps? It seems like the vendors (MSFT, SAP, ORCL) are providing clearer pathways for their suites to migrate to cloud - so in general do homegrown ERPs have bigger headwinds to move to cloud?
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Sarbjeet Johal
Migrations are multi-year journeys!
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jameskobielus
@bjfjallen Meets the SLA of the outsourced legacy apps, that is. "Spirit" in an enterprise context is all about whether cloud offering offers equivalent functionality + performance + experience
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Peter Burris
Great question! Another way of framing it is "what will migrate/what will be substituted for: apps, VMs, infrastructure?" Obviously more nuanced than that, but that is a central question for a lot of 2019 IT strategies.
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jameskobielus
@steve_pao Yes, much of this discussion is lift-and-shift legacy apps to IaaS/VMs or PaaS/containers in public cloud. By contrast, much of serverless is greenfield new apps in cloud.
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jameskobielus
@sarbjeetjohal Yes. Migrating a huge legacy application to cloud, if it makes economic sense, may also involve replatforming, refactoring, and rearchitecting for containers/K8s etc. This stuff takes time, money, people to get it right without compromising service lvls & security
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jameskobielus
@BobWambach1 Homegrown ERP has bigger "headwind" for migration to cloud because the enterprise needs to DIY its own migration tooling/strategy. With packaged ERP, especially if its SAP or Oracle trying to migrate you to their clouds, they provide the tools/PS for that.
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Ellen Feaheny
Efficient devops across many microservices architecture for pub cloud, dedicated hosted priv cloud, and on-prem cloud. cloud-first / smart design forces good constraints imo
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Ellen Feaheny
Yes this is my discs w/customers - but tech-detail devops strat matters. Microservices, integrated apps, integrated multi-dimensional DXs (EX, CX, SX) for expandible context single pane of glass sites is where we focus; no one tells me "too much" ever! AI, BI benefactor