Legacy companies have learned the lessons set by their disruptors and their own past and are adopting multi-cloud approaches and containers a co-founder of Sumo Logic has said.

The machine data and analysis firm’s cofounder and vp of product strategy Bruno Kurtic speaking to Devclass, said that two years ago there was lots of “talk” about multi cloud from traditional enterprises, but little action. However, Sumo Logic’s data sent to it by customers for analysis showed this was now becoming a reality .

There were two main reasons for this, Kurtic said. “Nobody wants to be in that 1990s world of Microsoft, where everybody got locked into a certain vendor and couldn’t get out of it. These traditional enterprises learned those lessons way back when.”

Whether they were going directly to multi cloud, he continued, “They’re all investing in containers and orchestration technologies, and to some degree Serverless, to give themselves a runtime architectural separation from the infrastructure as a service.”

As well as taking this path to avoid vendor lock-in, this also represented an effort to ensure fault isolation. “You don’t see Amazon having a lot of ‘everything stops’ issues,” he said. “But when they happen, they happen.”

At the same, he said, traditional companies had learned from the efforts of trailblazers like Netflix and Airbnb – and this was having a knock-on effect on traditional suppliers.

“The best companies adopted Agile, DevOps….the reasons they’re adopting the cloud is not because it’s less costly, but because it allows experimentation, Agility.”

“Now the disrupted are disrupting,” he said. “They’re learning all the same things, and they’re speaking to Microsoft and Microsoft’s saying ‘how do I go help them with this’…and it’s snapping up a bunch of companies.”

Unsurprisingly, AWS still dominates the cloud landscape, Sumo Logic’s data shows, with Azure in second place. But Kurtic said, Google Cloud was “growing quite a bit”, particularly in North America.

“One of the things we’re getting from customers is the tech stack is really strong,” he said. “Kubernetes, that was their Trojan horse. That was their way of capturing workloads from other clouds. That was brilliantly done.”

“Two years ago we were talking about all kinds of orchestration technologies, Mesosphere, whatever,” he said. “Nobody’s talking anything else but Kubernetes.”

He added that 30 per cent of its customers were using Serverless computing. “It’s quadrupled since we started measuring it a few years ago.”