In a recent article, InfoWorld looks at cloud workload portability and if it is a reality or not.
Portability is one of a number of specific design considerations one should examine closely before entering a public cloud and still relevant for private clouds. Portability, or the perceived lack of portability within clouds, is considered a barrier to adoption for some firms. Other firms may experience dissatisfaction with their cloud experience after a period of time when they may choose to move to another cloud provider. For others there may be no issue, for example test and development environments.
The article goes on to state that ‘Sure, Docker and container management and orchestration solutions have made portability vastly easier, but as soon as you start availing yourself of the special services of whatever platform you’re on, you’re hooked’.
The general premise of the article is sound. However, I think it misses a point, in that data portability in clouds, using technologies such as Docker, container management and orchestration solutions should provide less of a barrier for those firms concerned with portability, and more opportunity to those where portability is less of an issue.
Once you integrate any IT solution with other proprietary and, in many instances, non-propriety solutions and integrations, the ability of portability diminishes. This holds true for cloud and non-cloud (traditional IT) scenarios.
As we discovered on the Professional Cloud Service Manager course delivered last week, when the concept of cloud service arbitrage becomes a reality, hopefully full portability will be addressed, with the added bonus of true utility pricing capabilities for cloud users.
Until then, portability is one of the elements which should be considered when at the define stage of your cloud adoption strategy – even on a per-application, platform or instance basis, i.e. before a firm moves workloads into the cloud. It should also feature heavily in the design stage of a firms planned adoption of cloud based services.
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The InfoWorld’s article can be found here.