What Is Polycloud?

Chapter 4. When Should You Use Polycloud?

While we talked earlier about different paths to polycloud, and some of these paths were planned and others were much more accidental in nature, there is one important question that we should ask: When should you intentionally implement a polycloud architecture for your application?

There is, of course, no easy answer to that question. However, there are a number of questions that you can ask yourself that can help you make the decision as to whether you should implement a polycloud architecture in your application or if you should stick to a monocloud architecture. Answering these questions will make answering the base question much more straightforward:

Tooling costs

What is involved in maintaining tooling for both the development and operations environments for multiple cloud environments? Does adding a second cloud environment dramatically increase your tooling costs? Have you considered these costs in your overall architectural decision?

Expertise

Do you have the proper expertise in-house for all the cloud providers you are planning on using? If you are adding support for a new cloud provider, do you need to hire additional expertise? Do you need to add scope to your existing operations training processes? What about development expertise?

Cognitive bandwidth

Supporting a second cloud provider takes additional effort, in both the development teams and the operations teams. Do you have the team bandwidth it will take to keep ...