“Full stack cloud” or cloud agnostic approach to application building?
A “full stack cloud” approach is one that takes full advantage of a global cloud provider like AWS or Azure. Bespoke services are taken advantage of, even if that means lockin to the cloud provider.
Full Stack Cloud Benefits
- By using a broad range of services from a cloud provider (as opposed to multiple tech vendors), you reduce the vendor due diligence required, and the overall vendor management.
- Integrated solutions between multiple offerings from the same cloud provider are often easier to setup, especially when it comes to IAM.
Cloud Agnostic Benefits
- As a SaaS vendor, your customer’s may dictate how you can deploy. If they want a deployment to their cloud provider (or even on-premises), will you support it? This is a commercial decision before a tech decision.
Additional Considerations
- Even in the case of a “full stack cloud approach”, organisations should prepare sensible cloud exit plans. Even if the exit will take 12 months, it should have been roughly conceptualised.
- Many approaches that avoid vendor lock-in simply create lock-in to another tech stack. One can avoid vendor lock-in to ECS by using Kubernetes, but now you have lock-in to Kubernetes. Just because a technology is non-proprietary does not mean you don’t have lockin.