· Cloud · 2 min read
The Multi-Cloud Myth: When Reliability Meets Complexity
Running on AWS and GCP simultaneously sounds like a great disaster recovery plan. In reality, it's often a disaster in itself.
“Multi-Cloud” is a popular buzzword in the boardroom. The logic seems sound: “What if AWS goes down? We should also be on Azure!”
However, for 99% of businesses, Multi-Cloud is a trap.
The Lowest Common Denominator
To run on both clouds, you can’t use their best features.
- You can’t use AWS DynamoDB or Google BigQuery because they are proprietary.
- You have to use generic tools (like self-hosted Postgres or Kafka).
- This means you lose the “Managed Service” benefit and have to hire an army of engineers to manage infrastructure.
The Complexity Cost
You need security experts for IAM on AWS and IAM on Azure. You need double the networking knowledge. You need double the compliance checks. This complexity usually reduces reliability because there are more things to misconfigure.
Disasters are usually Logical, not Physical
If AWS goes down completely, the entire internet is broken. Your app being down is the least of your worries. Most outages are caused by Bad Deployments (code bugs), not data centres burning down. Multi-cloud doesn’t fix bugs.
A Better Strategy: Poly-Cloud
Use the right cloud for the right job, but don’t mirror everything.
- Use GCP for your Data & AI (BigQuery is unbeatable).
- Use AWS for your core transactional applications. Connect them with a secure pipe, but don’t try to make them interchangeable.
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