It started, as most bad architectural decisions do, with a PowerPoint slide from a VP who had just returned from a conference. “We need to avoid vendor lock-in,” he declared, and suddenly our platform engineer team had a mandate to distribute workloads across three public clouds. Eighteen months later, we had something that technically ran on three major public clouds (AWS, GCP, and Azure). We also had a Terraform code that made people cry and an on-call rotation nobody wanted.
This is what I learned about multi-cloud strategy, not the vendor pitch but the messy reality of keeping production alive across multi-cloud boundaries.