Love it or hate it, multicloud is the future. Modern digital business necessitates it; vendors struggle to develop products that make it easier, while customers impatiently wave cash in front of them. Unfortunately, easy multicloud probably won’t be under the tree this Christmas. But every other tech company in Silicon Valley is trying to make it at least manageable. 

“I think it’s going to be mandated … at some point in time where customers are going to start looking at diversification when it comes to running applications wherever it makes sense,” said Nicholas Gerasimatos (pictured), cloud computing emerging technologies evangelist at Red Hat Inc. 

The flipside of this freedom to roam the cloudosphere is the potential for sprawl, runaway spending, and communication breakdowns.

Gerasimatos spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Red Hat and Microsoft Corp.’s work to uncoil multicloud’s wires. (* Disclosure below.)

Magic melding — or just management?

Spending can spool out wildly with just one cloud to track, let alone many. Information-technology staff can easily spin up resources, then forget or abandon them.

“It may be not so bad if you have 100 or 500 instances. But when you talk to some of these enterprise customers that are running 10,000 or 100,000 instances and spending millions of dollars a month, it could get very costly,” Gerasimatos said. 

To reign it all in, customers want to see how everything behaves and interacts across all clouds. They want to see it in real time on a single pane of glass. It’s a pretty tall order. Standard application program interfaces for effortless cloud osmosis aren’t here yet; they probably never will be, according to Gerasimatos.

“We know multicloud is tough. It’s never going to be easy,” Gerasimatos said.

Red Hat and Microsoft are working — in partnership and independently — on solutions that provide the visibility and management capabilities multicloud customers need. For example, Microsoft’s Azure Arc extends Azure cloud’s management to any infrastructure environment. And Red Hat Insights is a management application for workloads and configuration. It can spot misconfigurations across environments and recommend remediation, Gerasimatos explained. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE