The market site of the company on December 9, 2021.
Major disruptions were faced by popular websites and apps when Amazon Web Services experienced an hours-long outage on Tuesday.
The debate on how organizations can minimize the impact of an outage in an era when data and services are increasingly dependent on cloud data centers was renewed after the incident. Is it possible for big businesses to rely on a single vendor or should they spread their workload?
Two days after the debacle at Amazon Web Services, an emerging company called HashiCorp went public on the Nasdaq, selling a multicloud story that is very popular among a growing number of enterprises. Engineers can set up resources in multiple clouds with the help of HashiCorp's software.
On its second day of trading, HashiCorp had a market cap of over 15 billion dollars, signaling a surge in demand for its subscription software and a desire to be able to work across clouds. Revenue in the most recent quarter was $82 million.
Target runs applications in its data centers and stores using the software from HashiCorp.
Diane Greene, then CEO of cloud services at Google, listens as Mike McNamara, chief information officer at Target, speaks during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco on July 24, 2018).
Mike McNamara, Target's chief information officer, said in an interview that he wanted commercial independence. These are large amounts of money. They are big spends. I want to maintain control over the deployment and management within Target so that I can move my workload to the cloud if it gets expensive.
Target didn't report technical issues during the downtime. The company stopped using Amazon's cloud years ago.
Customers stick with Amazon for all of their cloud computing needs, which is why they don't often promote the idea of using multiple public clouds. The multicloud trend is a boon for Microsoft and Google, who are eager to take market share from their larger rival.
Learning multiple code bases requires an investment in engineering, but the payoff is worth it.
Glenn Solomon is a managing partner of GGV Capital and a board member of HashiCorp. GGV has a stake worth about $2.5 billion.
Adoption of a second cloud might give companies more bargaining power because it might make them less dependent on their primary provider. The cloud provider that software companies use could become a competitor. Businesses may want to access specific capabilities from different cloud service companies.
Armon Dadgar, a co-founder and the company's technology officer, told CNBC in an interview last week that if you're in the Global 2000 you're going to be a multicloud customer.
According to the company's IPO prospectus, around 79% of Fortune 500 companies have downloaded the company's tools. Commercial versions of popular open-source tools are sold by the company. It sells licenses to software that companies can use in their data center.
Skeptics still doubt the validity of the multicloud religion preached by HashiCorp.
The CEO of PlanetScale wrote in a post that companies have other options to consider before deciding to use another service. It is a costly engineering feat, and it is possible to use multiple vendors without changing.
It isn't a good technical reason to do multi-cloud.
Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix, said the move is happening. His start-up helps organizations monitor their networks.
Three years ago, no of Aviatrix' clients ran in multiple clouds. Half of Aviatrix's 600 customers use a single cloud, but many use multiple public clouds.
He said that everyone he talked to said they were going to be multicloud. In the next couple of years, it will probably be 90 percent of our customers will be multicloud, and not because we forced them. I would love to have that power.
Some of his customers canceled their dinner plans on Tuesday. They had to deal with the problems caused by the downtime.
There is a public company going public with a valuation of over 14 billion dollars.
