The cloud industry sometimes takes itself too seriously in certain areas and not seriously enough in others. Corey Quinn is here to set the record straight on both counts.

The chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group (pictured) writes a blog on the firm’s website in which he has alternately lambasted Amazon Web Services Inc. for its cost, taken Oracle Corp. to task for lack of investment in data center buildups and documented Microsoft Azure’s capacity shortfalls.

For Quinn, no cow is too sacred and no one’s ox is free from being gored when it comes to chronicling the ongoing saga of the enterprise cloud world.

“We’ve long since passed the Rubicon where I can talk incredibly convincingly about services that don’t really exist and Amazon employees won’t call me out on the joke,” Quinn said. “It’s well beyond one person’s ability to keep it all in their head. Events are outpacing them, and no one is keeping up. Every release that a cloud provider does is important to someone, but none of it is important to everyone.”

Quinn spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in the latest episode of Cloud Native Insights, a series that focuses on transitions in the marketplace and how companies are making the journey to modernize and leverage cloud native technologies. They discussed how businesses need to maximize the services offered by a primary cloud provider, managing costs when moving to a hybrid cloud model, challenges posed by data transfer fees and the importance of picking a direction and failing fast.

Embrace differentiated offerings

That breadth of services now available to enterprise users is an important factor in shaping a cloud strategy. Hyperscale players such as AWS, now with more than 175 cloud-based services, can provide advantages far beyond basic needs of compute, storage and identity management. Businesses would be foolish not to take advantage of these, rather than blindly following a strategy of spreading workloads across multiple clouds, according to Quinn.

“I view best practices as sensible defaults, and I view multicloud as a ridiculous default,” Quinn said. “When you’re building something from scratch with an idea of taking a single workload and deploying it everywhere, in almost every case it’s the wrong decision. The idea of building absolutely every piece of infrastructure in a way that avoids any of the differentiated offerings that your primary cloud provider uses is generally not a great plan.”

By the same token, if a business chooses not to use the wealth of services offered by the major cloud providers, there are other more scaled-down and presumably less expensive options available.

The element of cloud cost is increasingly becoming a more significant factor as organizations migrate database operations. A recently released 2020 Cloud Computing study by IDG found that one-third of total information technology budgets will be spent on cloud tools in the coming year and the biggest challenge facing executives is controlling costs.

The expansion of cloud computing services has also spawned the rise of FinOps, a movement to control expense by melding development/engineering with finance teams inside an organization.

“Every developer you have does not need to sit through a three- to five-day course to understand the economics of the cloud,” Quinn said. “Most of what they need to know fits on a business card. Big things cost more than small things; you’re not charged for what you use, you’re charged for what you forget to turn off; and being able to predict your usage model in advance is important.”

Hybrid challenges

That last point represents a key element as organizations seek to strike a balance between running operations in the cloud versus on-premises. IDG’s survey reported that 92% of organizational environments were “somewhat” in the cloud, while a mere 8% remained entirely on-premises.

Companies have moved to a hybrid model, but will it be truly cost-effective?

“The reason to go to cloud is not to save money,” Quinn said. “If you’re looking at hitting break-even on your cloud migration in anything less than five years it’s probably wrong. There are edge cases where it makes sense, but by and large you are going to end up spending longer in the ‘in between’ state than you are going to believe. Eventually you’re going to give up and call it hybrid.”

A subplot beginning to play out in the cloud involves the expense of moving data out of cloud environments, charges commonly known in the industry as egress fees. It caught the attention of some industry observers in January when Dell EMC updated its Isilon OneFS file system in support of Azure and announced that any data written back to Isilon would not incur egress fees.

More recently, Backblaze Inc. offered to pay AWS S3 egress fees as part of the launch of compatible APIs for its B2 cloud storage. For his part, Quinn has been outspoken about the fees, calling them the cloud’s “Achilles heel” in one interview last year.

“It becomes this story of not being able to forecast what the economics are going to look like in advance, largely because people don’t understand where their workloads start and stop, what the failure modes look like and how that’s going to manifest itself in a cloud provider environment,” Quinn said. “Inbound data transfer is generally free, outbound generally costs an arm and a leg, and architect accordingly.”

Understanding success and failure

An underlying message in much of what Quinn writes for his blog posts about the industry is that enterprises should not avoid taking advantage of innovation and agility offered by the cloud native ecosystem. It’s about trying new technologies, failing fast and continuing to move forward.

“The right answer is to pick a direction and go with it,” Quinn said. “The biggest problem people have with getting there is they don’t stop first to figure out: ‘All right, a year from now, if this project has succeeded or failed, how will we know?’ Figure out what success looks like, figure out what failure looks like and, if it isn’t working, cut it.”

Quinn recently added “chief” to his title at Duckbill. The firm’s co-founder and cloud industry analyst appeared ambivalent about his new role, but like it or not, he’s on a cloud native journey with the rest of the enterprise world.

“When I was told one day that I would now be the chief cloud economist, I smiled, shrugged, put on backlog to order new business cards because it’s not like we’re going to a lot of events these days and, from my perspective, things continue mostly apace,” Quinn said. “It’s been an interesting ride.”

Here’s the complete video interview, the latest in the continuing Cloud Native Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE