What multi-cloud actually buys you

The pitch for multi-cloud is usually redundancy: if one provider has an outage, you fail over to the other. In practice, on a satellite communication platform I worked on, that isn't why we ended up running services on both AWS and GCP. We ended up there because different parts of the system wanted different primitives, and forcing everything onto one cloud would have meant fighting the platform instead of using it.

Pick the primitive, not the vendor

AWS Lambda, SQS, and EventBridge handled the event-driven core — device sync, SOS messaging, satellite relay — because that is where AWS's serverless tooling is deepest. GCP's Cloud Functions and Scheduler picked up the scheduled, interval-driven work alongside it. Neither choice was about vendor loyalty; it was about which managed service needed the least glue code for that specific job.

Multi-cloud earns its complexity when it removes work. It costs you when it's there to make an architecture diagram look thorough.

The tax you actually pay

The real cost is not the extra SDKs. It is operational: two IAM models, two billing consoles, two sets of failure modes to reason about during an incident. That tax is worth paying when the alternative is bending one cloud's primitives to do a job they were not built for. It is not worth paying for redundancy alone — most teams overestimate how often they will need the failover, and underestimate how much slower every change gets once two clouds are load-bearing.