Cloud Strategy7 min read•Nov 2025•980 views
Multi-Cloud Strategy: When It Makes Sense (And When It Doesn't)
Everyone talks about multi-cloud, but few do it well. Here's an honest assessment of when multi-cloud adds value vs. when it's just expensive complexity.
Multi-cloud sounds great in theory: no vendor lock-in, redundancy, best-of-breed services. In practice, it's often 2-3x the operational overhead with minimal benefit. Here's when it makes sense.
When multi-cloud makes sense
- ✓Regulatory requirements mandate data residency across regions/clouds.
- ✓M&A situations where you inherit different cloud providers.
- ✓True need for 99.99%+ availability via cross-cloud failover.
- ✓Strategic leverage in vendor negotiations (credible threat to migrate).
- ✓Best-of-breed requirements (e.g., AWS for ML, GCP for BigQuery).
When multi-cloud is probably a mistake
- ✓Fear of vendor lock-in without actual migration plan.
- ✓Resume-driven architecture ("it looks good on my CV").
- ✓Assumption that multi-cloud = automatic HA (it doesn't).
- ✓Small teams without dedicated platform engineers.
- ✓No clear cost/benefit analysis.
If you must do multi-cloud, do it right
- ✓Abstract infrastructure with Terraform/Pulumi (not cloud-specific tools).
- ✓Use Kubernetes for compute portability.
- ✓Standardize observability, logging, and security tooling.
- ✓Build automation for cross-cloud deployments.
- ✓Accept higher operational costs and staff training needs.
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