Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategies: Build, Scale, and Thrive
Today’s chosen theme: Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategies. Explore practical patterns, lived lessons, and inspiring wins that help you balance speed, control, and resilience across on‑prem and multiple clouds. Subscribe to keep the conversation going.
What Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Really Mean
Hybrid combines on‑prem or private cloud with public cloud; multi‑cloud deliberately uses two or more public clouds. The point is choice: place workloads where they fit best, not where contracts force them.
Architecture Patterns That Work
Centralize shared services—DNS, logging, identity—in a hub, then connect spokes across on‑prem, AWS, Azure, and GCP. Clear boundaries reduce surprise blast radii and simplify incident response during stressful nights.
Networking and Connectivity Foundations
Use ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, and Cloud Interconnect with redundant circuits and diverse paths. Keep routes simple, document prefixes, and monitor BGP health so failovers behave like drills, not cliff dives.
Networking and Connectivity Foundations
Define strict latency budgets per feature and propagate them through services. If cross‑cloud calls blow the budget, cache, precompute, or colocate. Your users feel network math more than architecture diagrams.
Not every table needs strong consistency across regions or clouds. Use eventual consistency for analytics and caches, reserve strict guarantees for transactions, and document recovery behaviors teams can practice.
Data Strategy and Sovereignty
Map datasets to jurisdictions and contracts early. Align DPA clauses, retention policies, and encryption keys with regional controls. Partner with legal now, not during a regulator’s unannounced site visit.
Data Strategy and Sovereignty
FinOps and Cost Visibility Across Clouds
Create a minimal, enforced tagging standard linked to owners and products. Automate compliance reports, and celebrate teams that hit allocation targets. Clear ownership reduces finger‑pointing when invoices spike.
FinOps and Cost Visibility Across Clouds
Move beyond total spend. Track cost per signup, build, test, or request across clouds. Share weekly trends so engineers feel impact and can choose optimizations that actually matter to customers.
Golden paths over golden cages
Offer curated templates for APIs, data jobs, and batch workloads with baked‑in security and observability. Opinionated does not mean inflexible; leave escape hatches for exceptional performance needs.
Terraform, Crossplane, and drift
Standardize on declarative IaC, enforce reviews, and scan for drift. Crossplane can manage cloud resources from Kubernetes, but keep blast radius small and roll out incrementally with clear rollback plans.
Operations, Observability, and Reliability
Adopt OpenTelemetry, centralize logs and traces, and normalize labels across clouds. Correlate user journeys with infra events, so a slow checkout points straight to the misbehaving dependency chain.
Operations, Observability, and Reliability
Define SLOs per critical path and budget error accordingly. Publish them openly so product and engineering trade‑offs are transparent. Invite readers to share their favorite SLOs and alert rules.