Cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure)Optional

Multi-cloud & Portability

Weigh the real costs and benefits of avoiding lock-in.

25 min read advanced 3 objectives

Status

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What you will learn

  • Understand lock-in tradeoffs
  • Use portable abstractions
  • Decide pragmatically

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The basics, in plain English

Multi-cloud means using more than one cloud provider at the same time, for example some things on Amazon and others on Google. Portability means building your system so it is not locked into a single provider and could move if needed. The goal is flexibility and avoiding being trapped.

Multi-cloud
Using two or more cloud providers together instead of just one.
Vendor lock-in
Being so tied to one provider that switching would be hard and costly.
Portability
Designing your system so it can move between providers with little rework.
Abstraction
Hiding provider-specific details behind a common layer so your code stays generic.
Hybrid cloud
Mixing your own data center with public cloud resources.
Trade-off
The downside, like extra complexity, that comes with the flexibility of multi-cloud.
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Pragmatism

Multi-cloud adds complexity for portability. Often a single cloud with portable tooling (containers, Terraform) beats true multi-cloud.

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