OTTO and cloud computing – a wrap-up of my personal cloud strategy experience with OTTO

In fact, most software development teams at OTTO are using AWS as an underlying infrastructure. Besides the huge IT landscapes comprising otto.de and DeepSea, there are various other departments deploying Microsoft Azure or Google's Cloud Platform (GCP) to implement their services. The differences are not always that evident or significant, but departments independently decide on which providers to use by comparing different solutions and going for the one that fits their requirements best. OTTO is multi-cloud at company level, but single-cloud regarding cloud use in individual departments.

Multi-cloud does not make your life easier in software development, it entails greater complexity and increases the number of specialized skills required for running services properly. Keeping your product cloud agnostic is not a good decision at all. You lose the benefits of quality services provided by a cloud provider. Using high-level, specialized services helps to conserve one’s own resources and enables teams to invest time into creating added value. In simpler terms, we earn money by delivering required features instead of updating database clusters. Cloud agnostic is something I personally would not recommend. Running workloads can be facilitated through containers, but from an overall perspective, you definitely want to make use of high-level services to get rid of time-consuming and often not too rewarding routine tasks. To give an example, why should you use a self-hosted queue on AWS when AWS offers different queuing solutions? Even with given limitations, it‘s often easier to use a managed service than to install, update, monitor, bug-fix, ensure constant availability, etc. for self-hosted solutions.

First, we have reached a sound and reliable level of experience using AWS which allows us to face the complexity generated by adding a second provider. With a wider range of possible solutions, our product teams will become more flexible when it comes to implementing their products. I think that it’s a benefit to be able to choose the technical solutions that best match the requirements of a product.

From a company perspective I support the notion of being less dependent on just one single vendor. We accept the extra complexity because employees need to have a better understanding of both cloud providers. Since other cloud providers have caught up with recent technological developments, we find similar and comparable services to be offered by various cloud providers. Differences exist, but to identify them you have to deal with the applications in greater detail. From a technological angle, cloud providers offer comparable specialized services in all areas. Technically, communication between cloud providers can be achieved using REST-orientated APIs or queues such as AWS SNS/SQS or GCP pubsub. All cloud providers offer container runtimes, serverless frameworks or databases to store data.

We support teams by helping them select a single provider. Following a strategy aiming at teams using two or more cloud providers simultaneously is not our goal. This would increase internal product complexity and wouldn’t increase the speed of team processes at all. If a team has sensible reasons for going multi-cloud, we will accept this. We intend to achieve a balanced use of cloud providers and will try our hand at experimenting with with GCP next to AWS.

We feel that a new journey has begun and we are curious as to where it will take us.