Multi
- Multicloud
- Using more than one cloud provider (for example AWS plus Azure or Google Cloud) as part of a single strategy.
- Why organizations do it
- Avoid vendor lock-in and improve negotiating position.
- A specific service is only available or is better on another provider.
- Regulatory requirements or acquisitions that inherited another platform.
- Costs of the strategy
- Duplicate tooling, duplicate expertise, and inconsistent security models.
- Cross-cloud data transfer is slow and expensive.
- Lowest-common-denominator architecture — you cannot use the deepest features of any one provider.
- What makes it more workable
- Portable layers: containers (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)), open standards, infrastructure as code.
- Not to be confused with
- Multi-Region — several AWS Regions, still one provider. Used for latency, disaster recovery, and data sovereignty.
- Hybrid Cloud — cloud plus on-premises, not cloud plus cloud.