Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Management That Works

Multi-cloud operations require teams to reconcile different resource models, identities, policies, and billing systems. Start by identifying what is running and which system owns each resource before choosing how to standardize it.

Here's what we've learned about what works when you're running production workloads across AWS, GCP, Azure, and beyond.

The Visibility Problem Comes First

You can't manage what you can't see. This sounds obvious but it's where most teams get stuck. They have Terraform for some resources, CloudFormation for others, and a bunch of stuff that was created through the console and never codified.

Discovery tools solve this. AWS Config gives you visibility into AWS. Google Cloud Asset Inventory covers GCP. Azure Resource Graph handles Azure. But if you're running all three, you now have three different inventory systems with three different data models.

ops0 Discovery scans AWS, GCP, Azure, and OCI read-only and normalizes more than 230 resource types into a single inventory, with dependencies, ownership, drift, and cost attached. It also generates Terraform or OpenTofu for the resources you select, so you go from "what do we have" to reviewed code in the same place.

Other approaches work too. Firefly focuses on cloud inventory and codifying unmanaged resources. Each tool has a different sweet spot, so compare how much each one finds and what happens after a resource is found.

Consistency Is Harder Than It Looks

Once you can see everything, the next problem is keeping it consistent. Same security policies, same tagging conventions, same compliance standards across every cloud.

Spacelift and env zero both support policy checks before changes apply, which works well if you are ready to write and maintain those policies. ops0 ships 137 built-in policies mapped to SOC 2, CIS, ISO 27001, ISO 27002, HIPAA, and GDPR, applied across the clouds you connect, before deployment and again against live infrastructure afterward.

Kubernetes adds another layer. If you're running clusters across clouds, you need consistent policy enforcement there too. Kubernetes policy checks and policy-as-code enforcement are the common choices. ops0 integrates Kubernetes policy checks natively along with container vulnerability scanning and per-namespace Kubernetes cost breakdown across all your clusters.

The IaC Translation Layer

Writing Terraform for AWS is different from writing it for GCP. Same concepts, different resource names, different argument structures, different quirks. Teams that manage multi-cloud often have specialists for each provider, which defeats the purpose of having a unified platform team.

AI is changing this faster than expected. ops0's cross-cloud transformation can take an AWS infrastructure definition and generate the equivalent for GCP or Azure. It's not perfect for every edge case, but for standard patterns (VPCs, compute, databases, storage, IAM) it handles the translation that used to take days.

Pulumi takes a different approach: real programming languages, so teams can build their own cross-cloud abstractions. The tradeoff is that you need developers comfortable writing and maintaining them.

Cost Visibility Across Clouds

Cloud billing is confusing enough with one provider. Three providers means three billing systems, three pricing models, three sets of reserved instance calculations.

Dedicated FinOps tools like Spot, now part of Flexera, handle commitments and workload optimization well, but they are separate platforms with their own learning curve. ops0 puts per-resource cost estimates into the deployment workflow, so a change shows its cost before it applies, plus per-namespace Kubernetes cost across your clusters.

What We'd Recommend

If you're early in your multi-cloud journey, start with visibility. Get one inventory of everything across your clouds, with owners attached, then bring the resources that matter under code one group at a time. Discovery tells you what exists; generated code and import are how you take ownership of it.

If you're already multi-cloud and drowning in operational complexity, look for tools that consolidate the lifecycle. The fewer dashboards your team has to check every morning, the fewer things fall through the cracks. That's the core problem ops0 was built to solve: one platform for discovery, IaC, deployment, compliance, and operations across every cloud.