Introduction
Multi-cloud has become one of the most repeated recommendations in cloud strategy conversations. The premise is straightforward: spread your workloads across multiple providers to avoid lock-in, improve resilience, and leverage each platform's strengths. In practice, however, most organisations that adopt multi-cloud end up with higher costs, fragmented tooling, and slower delivery cycles.
This post examines when multi-cloud genuinely makes sense and when a well-architected single-cloud strategy delivers better outcomes.
The Case for Multi-Cloud
There are legitimate scenarios where running across multiple cloud providers is the right call. Regulatory requirements sometimes mandate data residency in regions only served by specific providers. Mergers and acquisitions often inherit workloads on different platforms. And some best-of-breed services, like a particular AI/ML offering, may only exist on one provider.
The Hidden Costs
What rarely gets discussed is the operational overhead. Each cloud provider has its own IAM model, networking primitives, monitoring stack, and deployment patterns. Running production workloads across two providers means your team needs deep expertise in both, your CI/CD pipelines need to target both, and your security posture needs to account for both.
- Networking complexity doubles: VPC peering, transit gateways, cross-cloud connectivity, and DNS management all become significantly more involved.
- Observability fragments: aggregating logs, metrics, and traces across providers requires additional tooling and introduces latency in incident response.
- Cost management becomes harder: each provider has different pricing models, discount structures, and billing APIs.
- Security surface area expands: more entry points, more identity systems, more potential misconfigurations.
When Single-Cloud Wins
For most mid-size engineering teams, the pragmatic choice is to go deep on one provider. This allows the team to build genuine expertise, leverage provider-specific managed services, and negotiate volume discounts. The key is to architect for portability at the application layer, using containers and infrastructure-as-code, without paying the operational tax of running across multiple clouds day-to-day.
A Practical Framework
Before committing to multi-cloud, ask these questions: Does your team have the operational maturity to manage multiple platforms? Are there specific regulatory or technical requirements that mandate it? Have you quantified the engineering cost of maintaining expertise and tooling across providers? If the answer to any of these is "no," you are likely better served by investing deeply in one platform and building application-layer portability.
Conclusion
Multi-cloud is not inherently wrong; it is simply not the default answer it is often presented as. The right cloud strategy depends on your team's size, regulatory environment, and operational maturity. At CaeliCode, we help teams make this decision based on data and architecture, not industry hype.