This is a continuation from my last post: Infrastructure Ecosystem. People ask if there is a solution that can simplify from dozen’s of service providers, demand on skill diversity, intricacies on licenses and cost, integration challenges, and the bottom line of keeping up the maintenance.

One of the solutions is cloud computing. You can pretty much shift the entire ecosystem or part of them to one of more cloud service provider. In the following diagram, I use AWS and its services as an example to indicate how to map a three dozen vendors to a single vendor. This is an extreme way of infrastructure engineering, and it might not cover all the edge cases.

Please note, appliance and market AMI (Amazon Machine Images) are always available options if you want to bring vendor specific solution into your cloud landscape. I repeated it in four places to emphasize that is your discretion. In most cases, you don’t want to depend on cloud services provider for everything native, you might want to leverage their infrastructure hosting, but keep the best fit solutions within the ecosystem.

To avoid this picture becomes too busy to view, I purposely omitted software as a service (SaaS) where your cloud native solution is tightly integrated with “other clouds” such as Salesforce.com, OKTA, Microsoft, Google, etc.

Is this your preference?