Pontus Jaensson, Oscar Wiklund:
Handling Multiple Cloud Service Providers - Common Challenges and Best Practices,
summary, report, June 2022.

Abstract:

Customers have a high expectation on both availability and low latency for the applications they are using. In order to fulfill these requirements, organizations can use a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to deploy their applications in different locations within close proximity to their customers. However, all CSPs are not available everywhere in the world which requires global organizations to use multiple CSPs to reach their customers and satisfy their expectations.

The use of multiple CSPs comes with challenges that need to be identified. In order to reveal all these challenges both an extensive literature study and interviews with developers at IKEA were conducted. Several challenges were revealed which in turn were categorized into either a technical or a non-technical challenge. The main technical challenge was found to be portability, i.e. how to move data and applications between CSPs. Other technical challenges that are acknowledged are interoperability, vendor lock-in and security aspects. The non-technical challenges were identified as legal aspects, sustainability, economy and talent management. Due to the scope of the thesis, the main objective was to identify and explore the best practices for addressing the technical challenges.

In order to explore the best practices for handling the technical challenges we conducted a literature study intended to identify possible challenges before we explored them further in a practical context through hands-on experiments. This allowed us to conclude that abstractions and variant segregation among others are suitable approaches for addressing the challenges.