Is a multi-cloud strategy actually worth the architectural complexity and egress costs?

All answers to this question.

For a mid-sized company, multi-cloud can be a trap if you try to make every service redundant. A better approach is "Functional Multi-Cloud," where you use AWS for core compute but leverage Google Cloud for its superior AI/ML BigQuery capabilities. This way, you aren't trying to mirror everything, which keeps egress fees manageable. Avoid the "lowest common denominator" approach where you only use basic services; otherwise, you lose the innovation that specific providers offer.

   Answered 2025-11-05 by Barbara Martinez

How are you planning to handle cross-cloud identity and access management if you do decide to split your workloads across different providers?

   Answered 2025-11-12 by Richard Anderson

• Richard, most teams I know use an OIDC-compliant provider like Okta or Azure AD as a central hub. It makes managing permissions across AWS and GCP much less of a headache than local IAM.

     Commented 2025-11-20 by Steven Thompson

Multi-cloud is great for disaster recovery, but unless you have a specific regulatory requirement for high availability, the "all-in" approach is usually cheaper.

   Answered 2025-12-01 by Susan Taylor

• I agree with Susan. The bulk discounts and integrated security features of staying with one provider are often undervalued by architects.

     Commented 2025-12-05 by Amanda White