While working for a global customer a global banking and retail solutions provider, we ensures cloud flexibility by: Multi-Cloud Deployment – Spreading workloads across AWS and Azure to prevent reliance on a single vendor. Kubernetes & Open-Source Tools Using containerization and open standards for seamless portability. Pre Negotiated Exit Clauses Contracts include clear data migration and exit terms to avoid costly lock-ins. This approach gives them scalability without dependency, ensuring agility in a rapidly evolving tech landscape

It starts the moment you adopt managed services and lock into heavy discount plans. What feels like savings upfront turns into deep dependency, making migration a 1-2 year project if cloud native & managed services are involved. Most companies avoid true multi-cloud because of cost, skills, and complexity beyond a basic secondary presence. I’ve seen teams delay moves for years after realizing how deeply tied they are to one vendor. Lock-in isn’t just technical — it’s the contracts, discounts, and operational habits that keep you stuck. Yes carefully planned multi-cloud strategies & efficient architecture to support this plays crucial role.

To ensure we remain flexible and independent from specific providers, we follow these key strategies: 1. Leveraging Open-Source Technologies: We rely on open platforms such as Kubernetes, Ansible, or Terraform, as well as standardized interfaces like S3-compatible storage (e.g., MinIO) to maintain maximum portability. 2. Cloud-Agnostic Approach: We avoid proprietary cloud services whenever possible and prioritize solutions that can run in any environment. 3. Modularization & Interfaces: When cloud-specific functionalities are necessary, we design our architecture with clear interfaces and modularization to ensure seamless replacements with minimal effort.

Balancing cloud-native approaches with open standards is crucial for cloud infrastructure planning. For example, ECS is AWS's proprietary container orchestration platform. EKS is built on top of the open source Kubernetes. ECS is easy to get started with and requires only AWS and general container expertise. EKS requires some effort to set up, and doing so manually is tedious. EKS requires both general and Kubernetes expertise, and Kubernetes has its own learning curve.