Winds of Change From Vendor Lock-In to the Meta Cloud.

Abstract:

The cloud computing paradigm has achieved widespread adoption in recent years. Its success is due largely to customers’ ability to use services on demand with a pay-as-you go pricing model, which has proved convenient in many respects. Low costs and high flexibility make migrating to the cloud compelling. Despite its obvious advantages, however, many companies hesitate to “move to the cloud,” mainly because of concerns related to service availability, data lock-in, and legal uncertainties.1 Lock in is particularly problematic. For one thing, even though public cloud availability is generally high, outages still occur.2 Businesses locked into such a cloud are essentially at a standstill until the cloud is back online. Moreover, public cloud providers generally don’t guarantee particular service level agreements (SLAs)3 — that is, businesses locked into a cloud have no guarantees that it will continue to provide the required quality of service (QoS). Finally, most public cloud providers’ terms of service let that provider unilaterally change pricing at any time. Hence, a business locked into a cloud has no mid- or long term control over its own IT costs. At the core of all these problems, we can identify a need for businesses to permanently monitor the cloud they’re using and be able to rapidly “change horses” — that is, migrate to a different cloud if they discover problems or if their estimates predict future issues.