Happy New Year! We’re settled back in after a fantastic holiday and ready for the year ahead. A highlight of 2019 was attending both KubeCons, Barcelona and San Diego, as well as launching the first ever MulticloudCon, co-hosted with our friends at Gitlab. If you weren't able to attend, the talks are now available to watch.
84 percent of enterprises already have a multicloud strategy and most companies have an average of four clouds in use today. With this rapidly growing adoption, the multicloud community needed a place to convene and define what multicloud really means and share ways to be successful as they begin to move through their multicloud journey. That’s why we joined forces with GitLab to launch MulticloudCon, to offer a space for end users, open source leaders and cloud providers to come together and share successful strategies and learn about ways to advance into the future. Naturally, KubeCon was the right place to launch as Kubernetes has played a significant role as the "great equalizer" when it comes to working across multiple clouds.
We've uploaded the full collection of talks to share with the broader multicloud community and we'll share more speaker and panel recaps in the coming weeks.
The first two keynotes from CEO and Co-founder of GitLab, Sid Sijbrandij and Upbound CEO and Founder, Bassam Tabbara, kicked off the day and framed how to think about multicloud. Sid offered a pragmatic framework to help understand how to talk about and visualize the multicloud journey, while Bassam talked about the vision and path forward to a community-driven open cloud future.
Sid introduced attendees to the Multicloud Maturity Model, a way to think about the stages of multicloud adoption throughout a company’s journey. He walked through the various stages of maturity seen across companies: Mono-cloud, No portability, Workflow portability, Application portability, Disaster Recovery (DR) portability, Workload portability, and Data portability, noting that most companies are now aiming for workflow portability.
According to Sid, the importance of a multicloud strategy really came into focus for companies when they began to understand that "different clouds provided different workflows and toolings. The way you worked was specific to that cloud… and teams working in different ways began to impede collaboration and lead to a loss of velocity.”
Bassam's keynote focused on the vision for a multicloud future, one where innovation can flourish if it’s built around Crossplane. He describes the current state of the cloud computing ecosystem and how hyper cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are “master integrators” offering their customers a selection of managed services in a seamless, easy-to-use way.
He describes how tensions arise when this level of integration is not offered to everyone--open source companies are often on the outside, even if the technology is superior. Bassam explains that in order to advance innovation, we need to offer an open source, community-driven path in for all managed services vendors via Crossplane and level the playing field where open source companies, who are leading innovation, are on equal footing with the managed services chosen by cloud providers.
We’ll continue our recaps through the next few weeks. Until then, you can find all of the MulticloudCon talks here. If you have questions about Crossplane or how to get involved, please check us out on Slack or Github.