Over a decade after the launch of Amazon Web Services, Amazon continues to benefit from the “first mover” position. While AWS is still the market leader, cloud services from other industry titans such as Google or Microsoft have increased in popularity (as have specialized services from other vendors), preventing Amazon from having hegemonic control of the cloud market.

As a result, organizations and developers are utilizing cloud services from multiple vendors, leading to the aptly named paradigm of multicloud.

TechRepublic’s cheat sheet to multicloud is an introduction to using multiple cloud providers. This guide that will be updated as new integrations and services become available.

From the ebook

What is multicloud?

Multicloud refers to the practice of using services from multiple heterogeneous cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure, as well as specialized platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Multicloud also comprises the use of private cloud environments and hybrid cloud environments that leverage more than one public cloud platform.

As an architectural choice, multicloud can be used for a variety of reasons—the most obvious one is disaster recovery: While cloud vendors offer a variety of options and SLAs for redundancy to guarantee uptime and backups to ensure data integrity, both of these rely on the supposition that the vendor’s entire infrastructure does not fail at once.

While most workloads can be built to be vendor neutral (this flexibility is a primary benefit of multicloud), some workloads may benefit from using specific cloud platforms. For example, apps that use Alexa Skills are better served by using Amazon Web Services, as the APIs involved are native to AWS. Likewise, supported languages and depth of ability for natural language processing varies widely between different cloud providers.