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 cheatsheet

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

What is multicloud? Multicloud is the practice of using cloud services from multiple heterogeneous cloud services, as well as specialized platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or softwareas-a-service (SaaS) providers. Multicloud also includes using private clouds and hybrid clouds with multiple public cloud components.

What advantages do multicloud deployments offer? Multicloud is about enabling choice—to be able to pick and choose components from multiple vendors—allowing organizations and application developers to use the best fit for their intended purpose.