In this post, we will delve into the world of multi-cloud infrastructure world. What does it look like when I want to provide my technology in more than one cloud provider? What does it mean when I need to provision and manage production infrastructure in more than one cloud provider?
What we’ll cover:
Multi-cloud infrastructure is an architectural strategy where an organization uses more than one cloud provider, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, or others, to host its applications, workloads, and services. Instead of relying on a single provider, resources are distributed across multiple clouds to take advantage of each platform’s strengths, reduce risk, and improve flexibility.
Avoiding vendor lock-in is a classic reason for adopting a multi-cloud strategy. If your retail stack runs on AWS, you need a plan to replicate the same infrastructure to GCP or Azure. If Amazon moves into your market, you can pivot to a cloud that is not a competitor.
There is a rarer but costly risk. AWS can go completely offline. For that scenario, you want a hot hot failover to another provider, with your environment replicated and ready to take traffic at once. It is hard and expensive.
Most teams land between those extremes. Many customers require your PaaS to run in their chosen cloud. They want to click “provision in this provider” and go. This is the practical multi-cloud use case.
For example, a fintech company building a resilient, global system using a multi-cloud strategy:
- Compute and APIs on AWS: The production workloads and API gateways run on AWS for scalability and reliability.
- Data analytics on Google Cloud: Analytical jobs and machine learning pipelines use GCP’s BigQuery and Vertex AI for performance and cost efficiency.
- Identity and compliance on Azure: User authentication and auditing integrate with Azure Active Directory and Sentinel.
- Automation and governance with Spacelift: The company uses Spacelift as the orchestration layer to manage Terraform code for all clouds.
Spacelift automates Terraform runs triggered by Git commits, applies policies written in Open Policy Agent (OPA), and provides a unified view of infrastructure changes across AWS, GCP, and Azure. It ensures that the same deployment standards and guardrails apply everywhere, regardless of which cloud provider the resources live on.
A strong multi-cloud infrastructure consists of:
1. Cloud providers
At the foundation of multi-cloud architecture are the multiple cloud providers you choose to integrate. These can include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others, such as Oracle Cloud or private OpenStack deployments.
Each provider brings unique services, pricing models, and geographic reach. A multi-cloud strategy deliberately combines them to balance cost, performance, compliance, and resilience.
2. Networking and connectivity
Reliable, secure, and low-latency network connectivity between clouds is essential. This typically involves:
- Virtual private networks (VPNs) or dedicated interconnects like AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute.
- Centralized DNS, load balancing, and routing policies that span multiple providers.
- Network segmentation and traffic encryption to ensure consistent performance and security across clouds.
A well-architected multi-cloud network allows seamless communication between workloads hosted in different clouds, often coordinated through SD-WAN or cloud-native network controllers.
3. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Each cloud provider has its own IAM model, but in multi-cloud environments, you need federated or centralized identity control.
Solutions like Okta, Azure AD, or HashiCorp Boundary enable unified user authentication and role-based access across all clouds. This avoids fragmented permissions and enforces consistent policies for developers and operations teams.
4. Orchestration and provisioning
To manage resources efficiently, a centralized orchestration layer is used to define and deploy infrastructure in a consistent, declarative way.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Enables repeatable provisioning across providers.
- Container orchestration: Kubernetes clusters can span multiple clouds or federate workloads between them.
5. Observability and monitoring
A complete multi-cloud setup demands cross-cloud visibility for performance, cost, and health metrics.
Unified monitoring platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry-based stacks) collect metrics and logs from all environments, providing a comprehensive view of the system’s performance. This allows operators to trace distributed requests, detect anomalies, and ensure uptime across multiple infrastructures.
6. Security and compliance
Security controls must extend uniformly across every cloud boundary. This includes:
- Centralized secrets management (e.g., HashiCorp Vault).
- Data encryption in transit and at rest.
- Unified compliance frameworks (SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA) enforced via policy-as-code tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA) or Sentinel.
Security automation and posture management help ensure no cloud provider becomes a weak link.
7. Data management and storage
Multi-cloud setups require a strategy for data locality, replication, and synchronization. This may involve distributed databases, cloud-agnostic data lakes, or replication mechanisms that prevent vendor lock-in.
Object storage systems (like MinIO or cross-cloud replication of S3 and GCS) are often used to unify data access.
8. Cost and governance
Without centralized oversight, multi-cloud costs can spiral. Governance frameworks aggregate usage data from multiple providers and apply budget controls, chargebacks, or automated optimization.
FinOps practices help ensure each workload runs in the most cost-effective environment while meeting performance and compliance needs.
9. Automation and CI/CD pipelines
Automation underpins multi-cloud success. CI/CD pipelines built with systems like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Spacelift can automatically test and deploy code across multiple clouds.
Combined with IaC, this ensures consistent deployments and repeatability across environments.
It depends on the problem your business is built to solve and the risks you face in your market. If a hyperscale cloud provider steps into your space and that feels like a real competitive threat, a multi-cloud strategy can help you limit vendor lock-in and keep leverage.
If your application demands complete fault tolerance, you may want to replicate your stack in a “hot hot” setup across multiple cloud providers so you can maintain availability during outages and regional incidents.
The right answer also depends on your product, your SLAs, and what your users expect when things go wrong. Those three factors shape how you think about resilience, compliance, latency, and disaster recovery.
When these requirements are strict, multi-cloud often becomes a priority. When they are lighter, a well-architected single-cloud approach can be enough.
So what are the real benefits of multi-cloud infrastructure at a high level?
Reduced vendor lock-in, higher uptime through redundancy, better geographic coverage, improved disaster recovery options, and the ability to optimize cost and performance across providers are the main benefits of going multi-cloud.
1. Support different use cases and customer demands
Customers want choice without chaos. If you offer a platform or a PaaS, your users will eventually ask if you can run your technology in AWS, GCP, or Azure.
Why? Maybe they view Amazon as a competitor and want to avoid directly or indirectly giving money to their competition via AWS. Perhaps they have credits in GCP that would make using your technology over there more cost-effective. It’s possible their entire engineering team is only familiar with Azure. So they don’t want to introduce a learning curve by adding another provider.
So, if you provide your technology on more than one cloud provider, you can solve these problems for your customers.
2. Move faster as cloud providers iterate
Cloud providers are in constant competition with one another. They are in a steady state of developing new services and offerings. They are in the business of helping customers (you) solve your problems more efficiently. Competition is good for you, a multi-cloud thinker.
You can iterate on your own product or offering to leverage the latest cloud development that improves your services. With multi-cloud, you leverage that development in whatever cloud provider introduces it first.
Are you going to be able to introduce that new feature or performance boost in all cloud providers? No, but one out of three isn’t bad until the other providers catch up.
3. Reduce vendor lock-in and increase leverage
A multi-cloud posture gives you options when contracts renew and prices change. If a provider shifts direction or introduces new limits, you can rebalance traffic or move specific workloads without stalling your roadmap. That flexibility creates real negotiation power and keeps your costs and commitments in check.
4. Improve reliability and uptime through redundancy
Spreading critical services across providers protects you from regional incidents and provider specific outages.
You can fail over at the DNS layer, the service mesh layer, or the application layer, depending on how your stack is built. The outcome is higher availability, stronger SLAs, and fewer single points of failure.
5. Meet compliance and data residency requirements
Regulated customers need data to live in specific countries or legal zones. Multi-cloud architecture lets you align storage, compute, and backups with regional rules while maintaining a consistent control plane.
Deals move faster when security reviews are smoother and auditors see a clear path to compliance.
We now have a better understanding of the pros, cons, and common misconceptions surrounding multi-cloud infrastructure. Now, it’s worth discussing some high-level best practices. These practices can be leveraged to make multi-cloud possible, easier to work with, implement, or all of the above.
1. Choose the right tool and set up processes
First, it’s all about choosing good tooling. The cloud automation tools you choose to manage your infrastructure are going to make or break your multi-cloud adventure. We could even say that multi-cloud is impossible if you’re not using some kind of infrastructure-as-code.
It’s important to choose an IaC tool that supports multi-cloud. If you are all in on AWS and you represent all your infrastructure in CloudFormation, you are going to have a very difficult transition to multi-cloud. So, choosing the right tools that keep the door open to multi-cloud is critical.
Beyond choosing good tools, you need processes that make them required. This means if you represent all infrastructure as code, you do not allow for manual creation or modification.
Developers shouldn’t be able to create or change infrastructure in the console. Changes made by hand cause anomalies in your production environment. Anomalies that are not represented in code.
2. Modularize the core components in IaC.
Second, modularize the core components of your architecture in your IaC. Say your technology runs in a Kubernetes cluster provided by AWS. You configure `cert-manager` to be deployed to that cluster so you can do SSL/TLS to deployments.
With Terraform, you should have a module that represents all the resources for the Kubernetes cluster. Then a second module for `cert-manager` that gets installed into the cluster.
If you have a clear module system in your IaC, multi-cloud becomes a bit easier. Why? Because you know what modules need to be recreated to support another cloud provider. When you want to run this workload in GCP, you need to create an equivalent Kubernetes module. However, you should be able to plug in the `cert-manager` module without needing to rework it, as it only requires a Kubernetes cluster.
Read more: How to develop Kubernetes multi-cloud multi-cluster strategy.
3. Make architecture decisions that facilitate multi-cloud
Finally, make architecture decisions that facilitate multi-cloud. This is rather obvious when you stop and think about it, but it is often overlooked. If your architecture relies on a specific service from a particular cloud provider that operates in a specific way, it may not be possible to use another cloud provider.
The core cloud providers all have similar services. For example, AWS has Lambda, GCP has Cloud Functions, and Azure has Azure Functions. So, if your architecture requires a function as a service offering, you should be alright, at a high level. You may need specific features or performance from a given cloud provider service. These are not always similar and can even be very different.
So, as a best practice, aim to make your architectures as generic as possible. This makes it easier to port them across providers. Containerization is a great tool to think about that can make this possible.
Here are some good tools and processes for supporting infrastructure in multiple clouds.
- Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and other IaC tools for declaring your multi-cloud infrastructure in code. Choosing a cloud provider-specific tool is still better than having no IaC tool, but it doesn’t facilitate multi-cloud environments.
- Continuous integration and deployment for your IaC. Spacelift is a fantastic tool for this. It allows you to automate, audit, secure, and continuously deliver your infrastructure.
- Containers provide a cross-cloud packaging and deployment mechanism. You can use Docker or one of the many other tools out there for building containers like
buildahorpodman. Containers unlock the ability to have a single way to package your application and deploy it to any given cloud provider. - Okta or some kind of central identity solution. No one should be able to access cloud provider consoles via logins. Instead, it’s better if they come in through a SSO provider like Okta. This makes it easier to map your developers to roles or authentication mechanisms in different cloud providers.
Spacelift takes cloud automation and orchestration to the next level. It is a platform designed to manage infrastructure-as-code tools such as OpenTofu, Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Pulumi, Ansible, and Terragrunt, allowing teams to use their favorite tools without compromising functionality or efficiency.
Spacelift provides a unified interface for deploying, managing, and controlling cloud resources across various providers. It is cloud-agnostic, so you can connect to the cloud of your choice from the platform. Still, it is API-first, so whatever you can do in the interface, you could do via the API, the CLI it offers, or even the OpenTofu/Terraform provider.
The platform enhances collaboration among DevOps teams, streamlines workflow management, and enforces governance across all infrastructure deployments. Spacelift’s dashboard provides visibility into the state of your infrastructure, enabling real-time monitoring and decision-making, and it can also detect and remediate drift.
You can leverage your favorite VCS (GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket/Azure DevOps), and executing multi-IaC workflows is a question of simply implementing dependencies and sharing outputs between your configurations.
With Spacelift, you get:
- Multi-IaC workflow
- Stack dependencies: You can create dependencies between stacks and pass outputs from one to another to build an environment promotion pipeline more easily.
- Unlimited policies and integrations: Spacelift allows you to implement any type of guardrails and integrate with any tool you want. You can control the number of approvals you need for a run, which resources can be created, which parameters those resources can have, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications data.
- High flexibility: You can customize what happens before and after runner phases, bring your own image, and even modify the default workflow commands.
- Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints: You can define infrastructure templates that are easily deployed. These templates can have policies/integrations/contexts/drift detection embedded inside them for reliable deployment.
- Drift detection & remediation: Ensure the reliability of your infrastructure by detecting and remediating drift.
If you want to learn more about Spacelift, create a free account today or book a demo with one of our engineers.
Multi-cloud is not a small project. It requires careful planning, and a lot of such planning from the beginning of your product or technology. If multi-cloud is something you hope to tack on two years down the road, it likely won’t work.
It requires avoiding architectures, tools, and processes that lock you into a specific cloud provider. So, if a multi-cloud infrastructure is something you may need in the future, keep it in mind when making decisions about these things.
Continuous integration and deployment for your IaC
Spacelift allows you to automate, audit, secure, and continuously deliver your infrastructure. It helps overcome common state management issues and adds several must-have features for infrastructure management.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?
The main difference is that multi-cloud uses services from multiple public cloud providers, while hybrid cloud combines public and private cloud environments within a single architecture.
What are the challenges of implementing a multi-cloud strategy?
A multi-cloud strategy introduces complexity across infrastructure, security, and operations.
- Managing inconsistent APIs, networking models, and IAM policies between providers increases overhead.
- Monitoring, logging, and compliance must be unified across platforms, which often requires third-party tools.
- Cost optimization is harder due to fragmented billing and pricing models.
- Vendor-specific services also reduce portability, creating hidden lock-in even in multi-cloud setups.
How many companies are multi-cloud?
As of recent industry reports, nearly 80% of companies use a multi-cloud strategy. Most large organizations rely on two or more public or private cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in, increase resilience, or optimize workloads based on cost and performance. Adoption rates continue to rise, especially in regulated or global industries where compliance and redundancy are critical.
