Cloud Strategy
Cloud-agnostic architecture: the technical requirements most enterprises underestimate
Multi-cloud strategies often produce vendor lock-in disguised as optionality. This paper defines what genuine cloud-agnosticism requires architecturally — and what the organizational change program looks like.
The difference between multi-cloud and cloud-agnostic
Most enterprises that describe themselves as multi-cloud are not cloud-agnostic. They run different workloads on different cloud providers, often because of historical acquisitions or team preferences — not because those workloads could be moved between providers without significant rework. True cloud-agnosticism means the decision of where to run a workload can be made — and changed — based on cost, performance, compliance, and resilience requirements, not by the coupling between the application and the cloud provider's proprietary services.
The five sources of cloud lock-in
Cloud lock-in operates at five layers: data transfer costs that make moving data between providers economically irrational; proprietary managed services that have no equivalent on other platforms; identity and access models that don't federate across providers; monitoring and observability stacks that only instrument native services; and operational tooling built on provider-specific APIs. A cloud-agnostic architecture must have a defined answer at each layer — not just at the compute and networking layers where most architects focus.
The Aethon Core cloud-agnostic reference architecture
The reference architecture uses Kubernetes as the workload runtime with provider-agnostic storage abstractions, a service mesh for identity-aware networking that spans providers, and a unified policy engine that enforces the same governance rules regardless of where workloads execute. IaC is written in Terraform with provider-specific modules abstracted behind environment-agnostic interfaces. Observability uses an OpenTelemetry collector with provider-neutral storage — so your dashboards don't change when your workloads move.
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Paper details
Authors
Sarah Chen, Principal Cloud Architect
David Okonkwo, VP Engineering
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