Cloud application portability remains unrealistic

Portability is never easy or cheap

The fundamental challenge lies in the inherent differences between cloud environments. Each cloud provider operates with unique APIs, protocols, and feature sets, creating significant technical barriers to easy platform-to-platform migration. This has led to cloud services being another enterprise vendor option, procured and managed like traditional IT services. As Roy Illsley, Omdia’s chief analyst, points out, both cloud and on-premises environments require different levels of remediation work to adapt workloads to new platforms. These efforts can range from minor adjustments to almost complete rewrites of application code, contingent on operating systems and programming languages. I’m not sure why this is surprising news, but for many migrating to the cloud, it is.

Although transferring applications running within virtual machines might appear manageable, it diminishes some advantages of the cloud, including scaling flexibility. As for cloud-native applications designed specifically for cloud environments, the reality is similarly complex. Despite Kubernetes being a standard framework utilized by major and minor cloud providers, moving applications built on Kubernetes between providers often necessitates addressing variances in configurations and additional plug-ins.

It’s never as easy as those promoting containers and Kubernetes let on. Indeed, I’ve been involved with several container-based development projects after they went off the rails because IT leadership did not understand this obvious fact.