How to Make Multi-Cloud Work

Multi-cloud developments can offer real operational advantages. However, careful and strategic planning is key to maximize the gains. In fact, without clear operating models or setups, teams can experience costly missteps and cloud spent wastage. 

At Payara Services, we work closely with organizations deploying mission-critical enterprise Java applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As a result, our engineering team has been actively engaged in helping companies succeed in their multi-cloud strategies, and we know first-hand what works best as well as common pitfalls. In this blog post, we look at what multi-cloud is and share key insights and tips to optimize your multi-cloud projects.

Note: parts of this article were published on InfoWorld's piece "Multicloud developer lessons from the trenches".

What Is Multi-Cloud & Why Does It Matter?

Multi-cloud refers to the use of multiple cloud computing services, often from different vendors, within a single architecture. Rather than relying on just one cloud platform, organizations use a combination of two or more to meet various needs. These could be business-related, technical or required by regulatory bodies to support best practices and compliance.

One of the primary motivations behind adopting a multi-cloud strategy is the ability to optimize for best-of-breed services. No single cloud provider excels in every area. By selectively using the strengths of different platforms, businesses can tailor their cloud environment to best meet the specific demands of each workload.

Another compelling reason to consider multi-cloud is the potential for increased resilience and redundancy. A multi-cloud approach allows businesses to distribute their critical applications and data across multiple platforms, ensuring that if one provider experiences an outage, operations can continue with minimal disruption through failover strategies on another provider.

Compliance and data sovereignty also play a crucial role, especially for organizations that operate in multiple countries or regulated industries. Different jurisdictions impose varied requirements on how and where data can be stored and processed. A multi-cloud setup allows organizations to meet these requirements more easily by deploying resources in specific geographic regions and choosing providers that align with regional laws.

Finally, another benefit of multi-cloud strategies is the avoidance of vendor lock-ins. By distributing workloads across multiple platforms, organizations maintain greater control over their infrastructure and are better positioned to adapt to changes without being constrained by the limitations of a sole cloud provider.

Multi-Cloud Vs. Hybrid Cloud

While the terms multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are often used interchangeably, they are not synonyms. In fact, they represent distinct architectural strategies, each with its own implications for how organizations manage and optimize their applications and environments.

At a high level, multi-cloud refers to the use of multiple public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. In contrast, hybrid cloud describes a setup that integrates on-premises infrastructure (private cloud or data center) with one or more public cloud environments, enabling a seamless flow of data and applications between them.

Common Multi-Cloud Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them

While multi-cloud offers real operational advantages, it can also become a source of complexity, unexpected costs and operational headaches if not approached strategically. Without a clear rationale and careful design choices, multi-cloud strategies can quickly spiral into overly complex, detached systems that underdeliver on resilience, portability and cost-efficiency. In effect, a successful multi-cloud strategy requires more than just spreading workloads across different vendors. Let's look at the most common multi-cloud issues.

Firstly, the most successful multi-cloud strategies don’t pursue multi-cloud for the sake of vendor neutrality, independence or availability. Instead, multiple clouds are leveraged because there is clear advantage for a specific task within an intended application. Simply mirroring the same stack across providers rarely achieves true resilience and often introduces new complexity, cost as well as DevOps overhead.

Once the decision to go multi-cloud is grounded in real, task-specific benefits, the next challenge is designing systems that can thrive in such a fragmented environment. From our experience building and running systems in multi-cloud environments, the key is designing for autonomy rather than uniformity. That doesn’t mean each cloud or region should be completely isolated, but your architecture should avoid critical dependencies that span providers or regions. For example, replicating data across clouds is often better than relying on a shared, single-region service that becomes a hidden single point of failure.

This principle of autonomy also applies to how services are implemented, i.e. not every deployment needs to look the same. One common mistake is trying to limit your architecture to the “lowest common denominator” of cloud features. In practice, embracing the strengths of each cloud is a more successful strategy. Building different variants of your services that are optimized for each specific provider can provider more value than abstracting away all differences.

Another element to consider for multi-cloud setups, which are heterogeneous per se, is maximizing visibility across all cloud solutions. Thus, when it comes to monitoring, we recommend investing in a central, provider-neutral dashboard for high-level metrics across your multi-cloud estate. This unified view helps developers and ops teams quickly spot issues across providers, even if deeper diagnostics are still done through provider-specific tools.

Finally, how infrastructure is managed can play a key role in the overall effectiveness of your multi-cloud strategy. For infrastructure automation, solutions that offer high-level abstractions help maintain flexibility and reduce boilerplate. At Payara, we have had good results using Pulumi Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. This leverages full programming language capabilities to model infrastructure in a way that is both expressive and adaptable across providers.

Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Success

Summarizing what highlighted above, to make the most of a multi-cloud strategy, we recommend following these best practices:

• Define Clear Use Cases: Avoid “multi-cloud for the sake of it.” Begin with a business or technical reason—compliance, latency, feature gaps or cost optimization. This will help you inform your cloud choices.
• Design for Loose Coupling: Reduce cross-cloud dependencies. Each deployment should operate as autonomously as possible to prevent cascading failures across providers.
• Centralize Governance: Implement policies, identity management and security controls from a single source of truth to reduce misconfigurations and maintain compliance across cloud platforms.
• Standardize Monitoring and Observability: Use centralized monitoring solutions to gain unified visibility into all cloud environments.
• Automate Infrastructure Management: Use modern IaC tools that support multi-cloud abstraction.

Multi-Cloud in Action

Effective multi-cloud strategies are powerful but they’re also inherently complex, due to the need to operate across multiple clouds and vendor-specific solutions. Each provider has its own ecosystem, tooling, terminology and setups. Configuring one cloud environment correctly takes time and deep expertise. Doing it in two or more clouds (while keeping everything aligned) can quickly increase the time, resources, level of expertise required, complexity and risk.

To reduce that burden, teams can adopt a managed platform that offers cloud-agnostic environments for their workloads to manage the underlying infrastructure stack. This helps simplify cloud deployments while driving consistency. For example, Payara Cloud radically simplifies the process for Jakarta EE applications with built-in support for multi-cloud strategies. More precisely, it supports cloud configuration, application deployment and management by offering a fully managed, automated and intuitive cloud-native Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Instead of building and managing custom environments in each cloud, you deploy your application once through the Payara Cloud platform, choose your region(s) and the system takes care of:

• Provisioning the runtime environment

• Autoscaling and orchestration

• Security configuration and network setup

• Monitoring, observability and lifecycle management

Ultimately, your development teams can focus on the application while Payara Cloud handles the infrastructure, across different cloud environments and applications. If you're evaluating a multi-cloud strategy or looking to reduce complexity in your existing setup, sign up for a free trial of Payara Cloud to experience first-hand how it can help you in your multi-cloud adoption.