TL;DR

Multi-cloud is a requirement you discover, not a badge you collect. Add a second cloud when something concrete demands it — a customer's contract, a data-residency rule, a disaster-recovery target you have actually tested, or a capability your primary cloud genuinely lacks. Do not add one to "avoid lock-in" in the abstract or to save money: a second cloud duplicates your platform, your security surface, and your skills bill, and routine cross-cloud traffic is billed as internet egress on the way out.

If you do run more than one cloud, the workable shape is: split by workload (not by layer), keep data in one home per dataset, standardise the boring layer — source control, CI, Terraform workflow, container packaging, telemetry format — and let each cloud's native services stay native inside its boundary.

For most small teams, the right 2026 answer is one primary cloud, plus cheap portability habits: containers, portable data formats, and infrastructure as code.…