The Economist March 14th, 2020 Business Cloud Business “Altocumulus” “A new formation is rising in the computing skies” pp52
The latest layer of “IT geology is the ‘multi-cloud’”. Most businesses use some form of cloud computing be it applications or “number crunching”. The market leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, have the biggest fraction of the $230,000,000,000 spent on clouding computing in 2019. Nonetheless, partly because different applications have different requirements and partly because companies believe there is safety in having multiple providers, there is significant business for other cloud companies like Red Hat-Purchased by IBM and VMWARE.
Multi-cloud applications are those that coordinate an organization’s IT platforms. Under a “hybrid cloud” a company can coordinate its own software with others operated by Amazon, Microsoft, Google or others. A multi-cloud application might be used just to coordinate all outside cloud platforms. Now “VMWARE promises, the multi-cloud holy grail: to allow companies to shift computing workloads easily from one provider to another, depending on things like price, reliability and distance to the customer”. An open-source software that digitally packages computing is named Kubernetes, Greek for Helmsman, makes this task of moving cloud computing possible. IBM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are working on buying or developing similar capabilities as VMWARE. Some doubt there is actually much demand for shifting these digital containers.
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