Yes, it is helping me go to market faster. Because the biggest lie people tell themselves is that you can separate the operations of a service from its development. They’re intrinsically linked.

Netflix for example has a metric ton of OSS they’ve built to ensure smooth global operations even though they for a long time ran exclusively on AWS, and have now gone multi-cloud. I wonder why that is? Could it be that running a large service efficiently requires more than clicking some boxes and swiping a credit card?

Apple also is multi cloud and has been investing heavily in Kubernetes talent. I wonder why that is?

Handing developers the keys to the use any managed cloud service without regard to quality or price and especially when they don’t know what they’re doing operationally, hurts my go to market and risk posture when

- I get hit by hacks because they didn’t understand the security posture of the service

- I get hit by bugs that they didn’t know existed But thought that cloud magically makes software bug free

- The solution doesn’t perform or scale because the developers didn’t understand the nuances of a particular cloud’s networking or storage abstraction

- I have 15 different ways deploys of solving the same problem and nothing coordinated

- I have outages due to poor AZ or region planning

Now look, I think it’s great to avoid undifferentiated heavy lifting. I wasn’t implying that I was racking and stacking , or managing my own artisanally installed Kubernetes clusters, I have one that is automated from one of the many solutions out there.

This is purely about choosing the abstractions that I run my business on. I would rather use open and composable abstractions than proprietary dead ends... UNLESS it’s a throw away experiment or skunkworks and even then I’d be skeptical.

Tell me what staff I am saving by running a database on a Kubernetes cluster vs. RDS or Cloud SQL? I still maybe need a DBA. I still need to have someone keep an eye on upgrades , availability, and Performance across the fleet (which aren’t necessarily automagical). I still am responsible for the overall security posture.

We aren’t talking about racking and stacking servers and switches here, we are talking about administrator to server or administrator to developer ratios. And while you certainly can have a terrible ratio with Kubernetes (it’s early days) you also can get that down to a very respectable number with good practices and modern tools + abstractions.

As an aside, monolithic EMR/EHR systems are the bane of most health systems’ existence and the vendors like Cerner and EPIC know they have to change (to various degrees) or they will be changed by the market.

Multi cloud undoubtedly saves me money and risk because (a) there is no large company in existence outside of AWS, Google and Microsoft that won’t be multi cloud due to M&A and risk posture (b) I can use the right tools for the job in the particular cloud if they do have a unique offering (c) I can play them off each other when prices and quality suffer. (D) I can use the OSS that is driving the industry rather than using expensive knock offs (looking at you Kinesis!)

This belief that you can pick one outsourcing vendor and you’ll be better sticking with it for all your needs until the end of time is the height of arrogant naivety and has been historically disproven. But every generation needs to learn the hard way.