AWS re:Invent 2025 - Navigate multicloud with AWS: Essential foundations for success (HMC101)

Navigating Multicloud with AWS: Essential Foundations for Success

Understanding the Multicloud Landscape

• Customers adopt multicloud strategies for flexibility, avoiding vendor lock-in, and leveraging best-of-breed services
• Key drivers for multicloud include:
  • Geographic requirements (e.g. data sovereignty in EMEA)
  • Mergers and acquisitions
  • Regulatory needs
  • Resilience and redundancy
• Multicloud can be deployed in three main patterns:
  1. Discrete: Workloads in separate clouds with no integration
  2. Integrated: Workloads across clouds with some integration
  3. Flexible: Abstracted, cloud-agnostic environment

The Multicloud Readiness Framework

• AWS recommends a structured approach to multicloud readiness, covering:
  1. Enterprise Strategy: Aligning business goals, organizational structure, and policies
  2. Foundations: Establishing consistent security, observability, networking, and cost management
  3. Architecture: Defining cloud-agnostic principles and blueprints
  4. Data and AI: Implementing guardrails, capacity planning, and democratization

Best Practices and AWS Capabilities

Enterprise Strategy

• At the discrete level, rationalize multicloud investments and define a clear business case
• In the integrated model, focus on upskilling teams and aligning organizational structures
• For the flexible model, automate policy-driven workload placement and management

Foundations

• Discrete: Implement consistent security policies and unified observability
• Integrated: Design redundant multicloud networking and robust cost management (FinOps)
• Flexible: Leverage abstraction layers and Kubernetes fleet management tools

Architecture

• Establish cloud-agnostic architectural principles and socialize them through a Cloud Center of Excellence
• Leverage the AWS Well-Architected Framework to align principles and patterns

Data and AI

• Implement data and AI guardrails, capacity planning, and lineage tracking
• Democratize data and AI access across clouds through a "producer-consumer" model

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

• Multicloud strategy should drive people, process, and technology, not the other way around
• AWS Multicloud Program provides consultative guidance, thought leadership, and technical enablement
• Recommended sessions at re:Invent cover foundations, architecture, and data/AI for multicloud
• Visit the AWS Multicloud Kiosk for demos and the Executive Briefing Center for tailored guidance