Multi-Cloud and the Blockchain
You might know what the cloud is and why many embrace a multi-cloud strategy. You might even have a strong understanding for how blockchains can revolutionize the cloud landscape. Or, perhaps the last two sentences sounded like nonsense to you.
Regardless of where you are, this article will either help crystalize your understanding or introduce you to the basics of multi-cloud as it pertains to blockchain.
Though there are technical terms, understanding the cloud is as simple as understanding the workings of a lemonade stand.
The Problem
Imagine you are a kid with the goal of starting a lemonade stand on your corner, but you don’t have access to supplies. In order to open your stand and have a chance to make money, you need to first get the required supplies:
- Table
- Gatorade Jug
- Lemonade Mix
- Cups
- Chair
- Poster Board
- Markers
- Tape
- Etc
You have money saved up, and after buying everything, you open the stand. You run it well and start making money. Though you need to buy more lemonade mix and cups every now and then, the big costs are out of the way — eventually you bring in more money than it cost to buy all the equipment and mixes.
Congratulations! You’re in profit and have created a successful business.
This is no different than running an internet business. There are physical things such as servers, routers, etc (infrastructure) that need to be bought and set up so your website can communicate with the world and has a chance to make money.
Historically, each online business would buy and maintain their own infrastructure the same way you bought supplies for your lemonade stand. In the tech world, owning your own infrastructure is called having it on premise, or on-prem for short — you might also see it referred to as a private cloud.
The problem is the cost of buying and maintaining the infrastructure is much higher than the cost of setting up and running a lemonade stand. This has prevented many people from easily being able to get started.
The Solution
For your lemonade stand, imagine you didn’t have the money to buy the supplies. And let’s imagine rather than asking your parents for money, Jimmy, a kid from the neighborhood, used to run a lemonade stand and has all of the supplies in his garage. Because you don’t have the money to buy it, Jimmy decides to rent it to you for a daily fee. He’ll set everything up on your corner, and all you have to do is show up, mix the lemonade, make the sign, and start selling. For an additional fee, he’ll even bring new mix and cups whenever you get low.
Jimmy is able to get money for something that was otherwise sitting in his garage. And you’re able to start a lemonade stand that you might not have been able to otherwise. You’re happy to pay him a daily fee, and he’s happy to continue renting you his supplies.
This is exactly what happened in the tech world. Amazon was scaling and buying all their infrastructure in bulk to the point that they had extra. Rather than let it sit idle, they decided to rent it out to other companies. This was the birth of the cloud, or as some refer to it, the public cloud. Amazon’s cloud business is now their biggest and most profitable department.
So when talking about the cloud, physical supplies are still needed, it’s just owned and operated by another company rather than you. This lowers the cost to get started and saves time. Microsoft and Google saw the money Amazon was making and joined in on the fun. They are the three biggest companies in the cloud space.
So What is Multi-Cloud?
Multi-cloud means that companies use multiple cloud providers (Amazon and Google). For the purposes of this article we’ll expand the definition to also include the use of both on-premise and cloud infrastructure (you may also see this referred to as a hybrid cloud). Almost every company has some version of a multi-cloud strategy.
Why Multi-Cloud?
Back to the lemonade stand. Let’s imagine things are going well with the arrangement you made with Jimmy except that the weather has changed. It’s winter and the demand for lemonade has dwindled. Because you’re smart, you decide to convert from a lemonade stand to one that sells hot chocolate. The only problem is the gatorade jug has been used for lemonade so many times that when you make hot chocolate in it, it taste sour. Unfortunately that is Jimmy’s only gatorade jug. You both agree that his jug isn’t going to work for your hot chocolate needs.
Luckily you’ve made enough through the summer that you can afford to buy a new gatorade jug and use it exclusively for hot chocolate.
You continue renting everything else from Jimmy except for his jug — you bring your own for the winter season. It adds a bit of work because you have to bring it there every day and wash it at night, but it’s worth it because the hot chocolate sales are far greater when it tastes good.
In the tech world, that is the equivalent of having both cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Most commonly, on-prem infrastructure is required for sensitive data like finance or healthcare information. In these cases, security measures above-and-beyond what the public cloud providers offer are needed.
Another Multi-Cloud Example
Imagine that Jimmy’s poster board is beige. While it’s worked for a year, you want to optimize and think a white poster board can drive more customers. Luckily, Tony, another neighborhood kid, happens to have tons of white poster board and learned about your arrangement with Jimmy. He offers to provide a similar service. So you use Jimmy for the table, chair, markers, tape, lemonade mix, and jug (in the summer), and you use Tony for his poster board.
Companies make similar decisions with their cloud providers. They might pick and choose what each is best at, or might use multiple to ensure they don’t put all their eggs in one basket.
The Public Cloud Problem
Imagine Jimmy and Tony love burritos and you hate burritos. This was never a problem in the business arrangement you had with them, but they recently got jobs at the local burrito shop and feel they should no longer support burrito-haters. As they now have some money coming in from their jobs, they feel they can survive without your business and cancel the arrangement. You are not allowed to rent any supplies from them. Maybe you have enough saved up to buy everything yourself, or maybe you just invested all your cash elsewhere and you can’t afford any new supplies. At any rate, you have a problem.
In the tech world, this is referred to as deplatforming and all three cloud providers are guilty of it. Sometimes it’s valid (child porn is the easy example here) and other times it’s for political reasons (Parler being the case study). Regardless of what you believe, building a company on top of one or two companies that have the ability to shut you down at any moment is a big risk.
Enter Blockchains
Blockchains can do two big things for the cloud:
- Make it so any individual or company with excess infrastructure capacity can become a cloud provider.
- Ensure that nobody can be deplatformed.
Let’s Examine
- Blockchains are good at connecting people and creating markets in a transparent, trustless way. Previously, if a company had excess infrastructure capacity, it would be hard for them to find folks that wanted to use it and vice versa. Blockchains solve this.
- Blockchains behave and operate based on a coded ruleset. If the rules are set up so that it is impossible to deplatform somebody, then nothing can be done to the contrary regardless of what any person or group of people think (even the creator of the blockchain)! There is nuance here for things like child porn, but we’ll save that for another article.
In summary, blockchain innovation now makes it possible for people and companies to take advantage of the benefits of public clouds without having to worry about the risk of deplatforming. From hosting a small blog to running an e-commerce business, people have more options than ever before. Akash is the leader in the blockchain-based, decentralized cloud.
