The infrastructure portability that businesses truly require has not been successfully provided by existing cloud-native migration tools, infrastructure-as-code methods, or governance solutions.
The multicloud paradigm is currently facing significant challenges. According to Gartner, over half of all multicloud or cross-cloud initiatives are expected to fall short of their anticipated advantages by 2029, primarily due to issues like inadequate interoperability and widespread fragmentation.
Although these statistics don’t explicitly focus on cloud migration, my personal journey as an IT executive and insights gained from my research while developing FluidCloud reveal a strong correlation between multicloud dissatisfaction and cloud migration endeavors.
So, what fuels this widespread frustration? A significant portion of the blame can be attributed to the existing tools. While infrastructure migration platforms promise comprehensive automation, from initial data replication to continuous governance, they often introduce substantial deficiencies in the migration journey. Rather than achieving seamless multicloud flexibility, IT departments are left contending with a torrent of unforeseen tasks, escalating costs, and operational hurdles.
Fortunately, there’s a positive development: my team and I have pioneered an innovative method for achieving cloud infrastructure portability, known as cloud cloning, specifically designed to tackle these migration difficulties. In a pair of forthcoming articles, I will first elaborate on the limitations of current strategies, and then detail how cloud cloning effectively resolves these persistent issues. Our ultimate aim is to finally enable companies to realize the full potential of multicloud environments.
To begin, I will delve into the deficiencies inherent in the three primary types of traditional cloud infrastructure migration solutions: cloud-native tools, infrastructure as code (IaC), and governance platforms. In the subsequent article, I will illustrate how cloud cloning provides a completely novel framework to overcome these long-standing challenges.
Cloud-native Migration Tools: A Unidirectional Approach
When contemplating a move to a hyperscale cloud provider, their proprietary migration tools—including Azure Migrate, AWS Migration Services, and Google Cloud Migrate—often appear to be the natural selection. Tailored explicitly for the target cloud, these offerings can deliver superb automation for both provisioning and migration through the use of templates, snapshots, managed services, among other features.
The inherent challenge lies in the fact that a design optimized for a particular service often implies an exclusive focus on that single service. These solutions are offered to streamline transitions to their respective clouds, ideally ensuring long-term tenancy from the provider’s perspective. Crucially, they are not engineered to promote effortless mobility between different cloud environments.
This strategy for customer retention involves steering users towards proprietary native services (such as AWS CloudFormation, Azure Cosmos DB, or GCP Firebase Authentication). These services typically require extensive re-engineering of applications to function properly in alternative environments. Additionally, these solutions frequently promote vendor lock-in through pricing models, often by suggesting specific infrastructure paired with multi-year commitments to supposedly optimize cost savings.
To be precise, it might be unreasonable to demand a different operational approach from cloud providers. Realistically, we cannot expect them to furnish features and pricing structures that actively encourage customers to migrate to rival platforms. However, it’s equally important to acknowledge that a customer’s objective is to leverage the most suitable cloud for their needs at any given moment. This creates a fundamental conflict of interest between customers and cloud providers regarding true cloud-agnostic computing. Consequently, for migration projects, customers are well-advised to explore independent or vendor-neutral alternatives.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools: Incomplete Automation Capabilities
Possessing automated, version-controlled frameworks for development, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions such as Terraform and OpenTofu have rightfully cemented their position as vital resources for cloud migration. Their immense popularity is hardly astonishing (Terraform’s AWS provider, for instance, has accumulated over 5.5 billion downloads).
The core issue is that these tools often generalize infrastructure definitions, compelling teams to manually address crucial granular details. This omission becomes particularly troublesome in domains such as security policies, network load balancing, and firewall configurations, where minor discrepancies across different cloud platforms can critically impact migration outcomes and be exceptionally challenging to pinpoint. Even with IaC implemented, teams are still required to dedicate excessive hours meticulously examining plans, state files, and active resources to identify and rectify these elusive nuances.
It’s important to clarify that none of these observations are intended to diminish the substantial value offered by Infrastructure as Code solutions. Indeed, in the subsequent article, I will elaborate on Terraform’s pivotal role within FluidCloud’s cloud cloning methodology. While IaC serves as a formidable component in any migration toolkit, it is, by itself, insufficient to guarantee the flawless execution of migrations and the expected performance of resources.
Governance Tools: Designed for Detection, Not Resolution
There’s no doubt that observability and FinOps platforms such as Datadog, New Relic, and Kubecost play a vital role in identifying underutilized assets, performance constraints, and budget excesses. The challenge, however, is that while these tools are typically proficient at problem detection, the majority fail to direct teams towards the essential subsequent steps of problem-solving and refining cloud configurations.
- As their designation suggests, observability tools are engineered primarily for monitoring and reporting anomalies, not for automating corrective actions. For example, they might identify elevated CPU utilization or failed requests, but they won’t automatically provision new servers, scale containers, or modify configurations to resolve the issue. This responsibility falls to the customer’s operational teams.
- Concurrently, FinOps applications may notify users if a specific cloud region they are utilizing is disproportionately costly. However, they lack the automated capabilities to facilitate the migration of infrastructure to a more economical zone, nor do they offer cost comparisons to assist teams in discovering alternative cloud providers where existing infrastructure could be re-established at a reduced expense.
Governance solutions frequently excel at highlighting critical concerns, which is undeniably beneficial. Yet, without integrated automation for subsequent actions, they merely identify problems without providing resolution mechanisms. This level of assistance is ultimately insufficient.
Throughout these instances and categories of applications, the fundamental challenge remains consistent. The marketplace is saturated with products that, theoretically, promise to transform the intricate cloud migration journey into a streamlined and predictable operation. In actuality, IT departments are burdened with significant “last mile” efforts involving the translation and deployment of source infrastructure within the target cloud’s specific architecture and dependencies.
IT professionals merit a superior approach. Cloud cloning directly addresses the aforementioned challenges. I will detail its methodology for achieving this in a subsequent piece.
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