What is Cloud Agnostic and why should you be using it

According to Merriam-Webster, the term agnosticism is defined as “the view that any ultimate reality (such as a deity) is unknown and probably unknowable; or a philosophical or religious position characterized by uncertainty about the existence of a god or any gods”.

So why are we mentioning agnosticism, a philosophical and religious concept from a technological point of view? It is due to a concept that is gaining more steam called: Cloud Agnostic. According to Cloudzero, this terminology is known as “tools, platforms, or applications that are compatible with any cloud infrastructure and can be moved to and from different cloud environments without any operational issues.”

In other words, we’re talking about a decentralization towards cloud services providers. There isn’t a single “deity” or an ultimate reality like the dictionary states, which can be translated to the technological sense as not storing all our information or putting our products in a single cloud server.

Before being agnostic, we must start by knowing what Cloud Native is

How did this concept of Cloud Agnostic arise? First, it is necessary to give a definition of another terminology called cloud native, which allows us to understand better the need to transition being Cloud Agnostic.

The definition of Cloud Native is: “the approach of building and running software applications by using the flexibility, scalability and resilience of cloud computing”. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) describes this concept as technologies [that] empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds.

So, why does the evolution from being strictly cloud native to becoming Cloud Agnostic occur? Using more than one provider allows a liberty or commodity of moving between various clouds without the need to make significant changes in infrastructure set up. Therefore, when events such as the AWS outage that occurred on December 7th occur, being agnostic allows organizations to adapt quickly and easily to issues that might interrupt their services that they offer to the customers and/or users.

For this reason, we started noticing that companies are becoming Cloud Agnostic, by making sure their apps and services can navigate through different cloud service providers at the same time (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) without any issues. Also, by being Cloud Agnostic eliminates the dependency on a single supplier, the limitation and vendor lock in of any of these servers is also erased.

Benefits of being Cloud Agnostic

According to the “State of the Cloud,” a report published by Flexera, 76% of companies have started to become Cloud Agnostic.

Using various cloud service providers at the same time, businesses are starting to have the requirement that their products are avaliable to consumers regardless where the information is running via Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. In fact, this allows DevSecOps to keep in mind the quality standards to operate in each of these clouds as a part of their strategy. These are some of the benefits of being Cloud Agnostic, but what are some more positive aspects?

1. Vendor lock-in elimination. By being with more than one cloud service provider at the same time, businesses can start having more versatility with the products they offer without being wed to a functional and contractual exclusivity. Furthermore, this allows companies to be more flexible when any technological change or event appears in which servers can have outages that negatively affect sales or the daily activities in a corporation. In conclusion, being cloud agnostic reduces downtime.
2. Better risk management. By not relying on a single cloud service provider, can easily and promptly address issues when one of these cloud platforms starts to have problems.
3. Flexibility. Cloud Agnostic platforms allow accesses to open-source technologies, an easier migration from one cloud service provider to another as well as the addition of more cloud environments that the company already has in its portfolio so the service and/or product that is being offered can be delivered more safely and swiftly to the end users.
4. More coverage. When companies are Cloud Agnostic, working with more than one cloud service provider allows them to reach out to more resources. There is a better cross-cloud consistency in information and updates that occur on the clouds.
5. Deployment in any cloud. Developers are no longer concerned about which cloud to deploy their apps and services. Since being Cloud Agnostic allows an abstraction layer that permits an interaction between all the cloud providers, all the apps, services or products can navigate between each of these cloud environments without any issue.
6. A broad choice of providers. DevSecOps can also deploy or migrate their apps to the cloud that best suits their needs and specs without having to wait for the app to have a functional limitation due to the control parameters of a certain cloud service provider.

What is being Cloud Agnostic with Cuemby?

Businesses are starting to make the jump to be cloud agnostic. With Cuemby, makes the transition easier with our Cuemby Cloud Platform, it is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to effortlessly provision, manage, and scale cloud infrastructure without the hassle of investing time and resources into developing any of the underlying competencies such as engineering, automation, performance and security to do so reliably, in-house.

Taking the first step of being cloud agnostic is as easy as contacting us for a consultancy to get to know better how can Cuemby Cloud Platform help you.

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