Multicloud

Multicloud (also written as multi-cloud or multi cloud) refers to a company utilizing multiple cloud computing services from various public vendors within a single, heterogeneous architecture. This approach enhances cloud infrastructure capabilities and optimizes costs. It also refers to the distribution of cloud assets, software, applications, etc. across several cloud-hosting environments. With a typical multicloud architecture utilizing two or more public clouds as well as multiple private clouds, a multicloud environment aims to eliminate the reliance on any single cloud provider and thereby alleviate vendor lock-in.

For instance, an enterprise may use separate cloud providers for infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), software (SaaS) and container (FaaS) services. In the latter case, they may use different infrastructure providers for different workloads, deploy a single workload load balanced across multiple providers (active-active), or deploy a single workload on one provider, with a backup on another (active-passive).