With multicloud, startups embrace boundless change

Multicloud isn’t a new concept for enterprise businesses, but it is just gaining ground with startups. It might seem counterintuitive, but more and more startups are embracing a multicloud strategy for growth.

I know, I know. The knee-jerk reaction is that startups only use one cloud — and it’s Amazon Web Services. That was true for many years, and AWS is still a powerhouse, but the landscape is changing fast. Startups are increasingly using a combination of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and other vendors to scale their growing businesses.

Guy Mounier, Co-founder of New York-based startup Aptivio, explained, “Each cloud has specific strengths depending on workload. OCI has strong security and very high availability rate; Azure is strong in data enrichments and automation, and AWS is good at storing web front-end components.”

There are many advantages to pursuing a multicloud strategy. Global technologist and cloud expert Kevin L. Jackson summed it up on a recent podcast with a statement so simple it was brilliant: “A constant in life is change. If you commit to a single cloud service provider, you are limiting your ability to change. Before [cloud], vendor lock-in was always a bad thing. So why is vendor lock-in a good thing in cloud computing? It’s not.”

There it was. Simple and true. And it’s more than “lock-in,” it’s the ramifications of lock-in. Change brings growth, adaptability, agility, and evolution — all the attributes at the core of a startup’s DNA. You limit your changeability, and you limit your possibility for growth. That’s a big ‘no’ for entrepreneurs.

Here are four reasons startups are making the move to multicloud and embracing unbound change, pulled from our recently published ebook How Multicloud Paves New Paths for Scaling Startups.

Cherry-picking the best cloud capabilities

Using a multicloud strategy lets startups cherry-pick the best cloud for their need at any given moment.

Computer vision startup IDenTV uses a mixture of AWS, Azure, and OCI. Cofounder Amro Shihadah says, “We can utilize different virtual machine instances specific to our high-performance computing needs.” The company uses the world-class GPU infrastructure on Oracle Cloud “while being able to utilize AWS Elastic compute for inference engine deployment.”

Similarly, Guy Mounier of Aptivio uses multiple clouds and says Oracle’s partnership with Microsoft made it simpler to pick the right cloud for the right job, and made life easier “from a performance and connectivity standpoint.”

Deploying on a customer’s preferred cloud

Scaleup companies, especially SaaS startups, need to deploy on their client’s preferred cloud. Snap Vision founder and CEO Jenny Griffiths says, “Being able to offer a multicloud strategy is important to us. We’ve seen great gains since moving to OCI, but we’re conscious that when we’re licensing our technology to customers, they often have their own hosting requirements. We’ve embraced a multicloud strategy to offer customers flexibility.”

Snapper Future Tech CTO Kamlesh Nagware agrees, “Because blockchain goes beyond a single enterprise to bring multiple entities together on a single network, we need to support customers that run on a variety of different cloud platforms.”

Embracing flexibility

Multicloud is aided by container-based architecture and orchestration solutions like Kubernetes, which make moving workloads between clouds much easier. Dr. Abdulrahman Alsultan, Cofounder and CEO of Awini, says “We wanted to change our solution architecture from VM-based to containers-based architecture, as the latter provides more control and efficient operations. And Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides managed Kubernetes services which gave us the freedom to design our solution the way we see fit.”

Molecula founder and CEO HO Maycotte predicts “Erasing the lines between clouds will become a number one priority in the next five years and Oracle could emerge the neutral leader in this space and continue to dominate in both database and applications.”

Saving costs while boosting performance

Is a cloud provider giving you sticker shock? Having more than one vendor levels the playing field. “At any moment in time, one of our cloud partners can provide a compute unit that’s more cost-effective than another, so we need to route to those locations immediately,” said Mark Ross, CEO, and Cofounder of GridMarkets.

Laurent Gil, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of CAST.AI, added “Our algorithm can determine that the best price to keep a data store is on Azure, but recommend that all the heavy compute virtual machines (VMs) should come from Oracle to get the best price and performance for compute.”

Can multicloud “future-proof” your startup?

Sure, startups can run on one cloud. We see it happen all the time with OCI, but the startups wanting to scale up — and which ones don’t? — will need to plan ahead.

Jason Williamson, VP of Oracle for Startups, says “It’s about future-proofing your startup by having the cloud providers that will allow you to scale without technology friction. It’s about flexibility, ubiquity, and freedom.” It’s about providing startups the ability to change.

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