Multi-cloud and Kubernetes are at the center of customer’s platform play and announcement of AWS’s EKS Anywhere underscores the importance of it.

What is announced and Why is it making news?

AWS at its annual event re:Invent announced Amazon EKS Anywhere offering. This allows you to create and operate Kubernetes clusters based on Amazon EKS Anywhere. In its introduction it didn’t say specifically across other cloud vendors. However during the interview Deepak Singh, Director of compute services at AWS said “There is no technical restriction for them in doing that.”

Why I think this is a big news is because of the following reasons :

• This announcement highlights growth of multi-cloud as a platform play in coming days
• This announcement also underscores the importance of Kubernetes as a platform
• AWS is challenging not only Google’s Anthos , but it is squarely challenging IBM- Red Hat’s Openshift, Mirantis and other Kubernetes solution providers
• Lastly, this announcement also highlights the attempts by big tech companies to create lock-in one way or the other.

At my company Ashnik, we have been experiencing customer’s increasing choice of multi-cloud approach in Southeast Asia and India for few months now. In a survey done in August 2020, 72% of enterprise customers voiced that multi-cloud adoption would increase in their organizations in 12 months. One of the key reasons to go for multi-cloud approach is de-risking strategy or avoiding cloud vendor lock-in. Customers, although, like the convenience of cloud platforms, they also want freedom of choice.

With the rapid growth and maturity of Kubernetes, it has become a powerful technology to exercise ‘cloud platform interoperability’. At least in theory it promises to be. There are few roadblocks, which can be overcome, in implementation though. Kubernetes platform, when used properly, really allows you to move your workloads across the platforms – be it your own data center or public cloud vendors.

This is one of the key reasons why Kubernetes became so much important play for IBM and it paid huge amount (almost $34 billion) to acquire Red Hat. Through Red Hat’s Openshift, IBM was looking to disrupt established cloud vendors – AWS, Azure and Google’s GCP. It started positioning Kubernetes at the center of customer’s cloud platform initiative.

If independent, truly open Kubernetes platform becomes reality it has a potential of reducing the importance of underlying cloud platforms – be it AWS or GCP or Azure. Sensing the threat to their lock-in strategy or their stickiness getting reduced, both AWS and Google have launched their own offering of Kubernetes platforms that would enable customers to take their workload across the cloud platforms. Thus AWS and Google are indirectly telling customers, “if you are anyway looking for multi-cloud platform, use mine, instead of true, open Kubernetes and thus remain under my lock-in.”

Is this good for enterprise customers?

While it is early to tell how successful would these offering be, but one thing is sure, customers want to get rid of vendor lock-in. However, Google version of Kubernetes and AWS version of Kubernetes or IBM’s version of Kubernetes is certainly not a good sign. Even though they all are variants of Kubernetes, the vendor specific implementations inherently creates lock-in. The big guys of technology are finding ways to create stickiness one way or the other. For enterprise customers, EKS Anywhere or Google’s Anthos would mean lot of convenience and ease of implementing multi-cloud strategy, but they would still experience the lock-in. Customers would need to evaluate its options and they are :

1. Leveraging true open Kuberenet platform such as from Mirantis. Using such platform would mean bit more work on the part of customers but would give real freedom of choice in customer’s hands OR
2. Opting for convenience and sacrificing the freedom.

Choice is yours!