When people talk about multi-cloud, the debate usually spirals into technical rabbit holes:
Which provider has the better GPU instances? Which load balancer scales faster? Which storage tier costs less at scale?
But the reality is: the hardest part of multi-cloud has nothing to do with compute, storage, or networking. It’s about people.
The Mirage of Technical Complexity
On the surface, multi-cloud sounds like a purely engineering problem. Abstract your workloads, adopt Terraform for infra as code, standardize on Kubernetes, and boom — your application runs anywhere.
Vendors love this story. Engineers like to debate the details. But in practice, tools don’t erase organizational friction. You can buy the shiniest cloud-agnostic platform and still end up with teams pulling in opposite directions.
Culture Eats Cloud Strategy for Breakfast
Multi-cloud strategies often fail not because AWS, Azure, or GCP fell short, but because the people adopting them weren’t aligned.
- Different comfort zones: One team is “all-in AWS,” while another has deep GCP expertise. Suddenly, every decision becomes a turf war.
- Budget silos: Finance wants one invoice, but multi-cloud doubles reporting headaches.
- Security battles: Each cloud has its own IAM, its own quirks, its own failure modes. Without alignment, you don’t get resilience — you get chaos.
The technical challenges are solvable. The cultural ones can sink the entire strategy.
Organizational Gravity
Here’s the hidden truth: most companies don’t choose multi-cloud for innovation — they end up there because of acquisitions, vendor lock-in fears, or leadership mandates.
That means engineers inherit complexity they didn’t sign up for. If leadership doesn’t invest in communication, shared processes, and cross-training, the weight of organizational gravity pulls projects down.
The People Work
So if multi-cloud isn’t about clouds, what is it about?
- Shared language: Creating a culture where AWS and GCP engineers can actually talk to each other without jargon wars.
- Enablement over policing: Instead of security being the “no” team, make them partners in designing reusable guardrails across providers.
- Strong glue: Whether it’s a platform engineering team, a Cloud Center of Excellence, or just a few stubborn engineers who document everything — you need human glue to hold the strategy together.
Multi-cloud succeeds when organizations treat it as a cultural integration project, not just a technical one.
Final Thought
In the end, clouds are just platforms. They’ll keep evolving, adding services, competing on features. But the success of your multi-cloud strategy will never depend on whether you chose the right storage tier — it will depend on whether your people can align, adapt, and collaborate across boundaries.
Because multi-cloud isn’t really about clouds.
It’s about people.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might like my other explorations of culture vs. technology in DevOps on NotSoStatic. Don’t miss future posts — subscribe here.
