Organizations are becoming more comfortable with the Polycloud strategy — rather than going "all-in" with one provider, they are passing different types of workloads to different providers based on their own strategy. Some of them apply the best-of-breed approach, for example: putting standard services on AWS, but using Google for machine learning and data-oriented applications and Azure for Microsoft Windows applications. For some organizations this is a cultural and business decision. Retail businesses, for example, often refuse to store their data on Amazon and they distribute load to different providers based on their data. This is different to a cloud-agnostic strategy of aiming for portability across providers, which is costly and forces lowest-common-denominator thinking. Polycloud instead focuses on using the best match that each cloud provider offers.
The major cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) are locked in an aggressive race to maintain parity on core capabilities while their products are differentiated only marginally. This is causing a few organizations to adopt a Polycloud strategy — rather than going ‘all-in’ with one provider, they are passing different types of workloads to different providers in a best-of-breed approach. This may involve, for example, putting standard services on AWS, but using Google for machine learning, Azure for .NET applications that use SQLServer, or potentially using the Ethereum Consortium Blockchain solution. This is different than a cloud-agnostic strategy of aiming for portability across providers, which is costly and forces lowest-common-denominator thinking. Polycloud instead focuses on using the best that each cloud offers.
