When you went all-in on the cloud, you were promised agility and savings. But sometimes, the reality feels very different. Instead of simplicity and flexibility, you’re facing higher bills, shrinking options, and a single vendor with all the leverage.
You’ve just swapped one form of vendor lock-in for another, and this lack of control can be incredibly expensive. Research from Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report indicates that C-level leaders estimate that 27% of all cloud spend yields no business value, often wasted on idle or overprovisioned resources. It’s a cost that’s almost impossible to recover when you’re tied to one vendor.
The problem isn’t the cloud itself; it’s how it’s being used. A deliberate multi-cloud strategy restores control by putting you back in charge of where and how your data runs. It’s not just “using multiple clouds.” It’s building your architecture for freedom, cost predictability, and resilience.
The multi-cloud illusion (and why most strategies fail)
Most executives pursue a multi-cloud strategy for three clear, bottom-line reasons:
- Cost control: To escape provider markups and regain negotiating power.
- Resilience: To mitigate the business risk of a regional or provider-wide outage.
- Freedom: To avoid vendor lock-in and run workloads where they make the most sense.
Many organizations already believe they’ve achieved that. They run workloads across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and assume that’s enough to claim independence. In reality, that multi-cloud is often only surface deep.
At the infrastructure level, workloads are distributed. At the data layer, they’re still trapped. Applications move easily between environments, but databases rarely do. Proprietary managed services promise convenience while quietly creating dependency through unique APIs, monitoring systems, and backup formats that make migration slow, expensive, and risky.
That’s the illusion behind many multi-cloud strategies. The architecture looks flexible from the outside, but the data itself is locked in. When your databases can’t move freely, neither can your business.
A real multi-cloud strategy begins by addressing that issue. True independence begins when your data layer runs consistently across clouds, on your terms, without vendor constraints.
Kubernetes: The foundation for real data portability
If proprietary services are the trap, Kubernetes is the way out. It provides a strategic fix by offering a consistent, universal platform for running workloads anywhere (public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises) without requiring the rewriting of applications or the rebuilding of environments.
When you run your database on Kubernetes, you abstract it from the underlying hardware and cloud provider. Your database is no longer an “AWS database” or a “Google database”; it’s just a PostgreSQL or MySQL database that can run identically on any platform.
The results speak for themselves. According to the 2024 Data on Kubernetes Report, nearly half of organizations now run 50% or more of their data workloads on Kubernetes, and databases are the number one workload type on the platform. The reason is simple: Kubernetes makes portability possible.
When databases run on Kubernetes, they inherit the same flexibility as applications. With Kubernetes Operators, complex operational tasks such as backups, scaling, and failover can be automated and executed consistently across environments.
This is where Percona comes in. Our open source operators codify decades of database expertise for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB, providing enterprises with a single model for automation, resilience, and performance, regardless of where their data resides.
The business case: Open source + Kubernetes = control
Every cloud strategy eventually comes down to one question: who controls the costs, the data, and the architecture? Running open source databases on Kubernetes gives that control back to you.
Proprietary Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platforms typically incur a management premium of 80 to 100% over the base infrastructure costs. Our recent Take Back Control of Your Databases research paper shows that convenience comes at a steep price, often doubling spend for identical compute and storage. By running open source databases on Kubernetes, you eliminate the premium and replace unpredictable billing with transparent, usage-based costs.
The advantage is also more than financial, as open source databases on Kubernetes are fully portable. There are no license fees, no paywalled enterprise features, and no application rewrites required just because you want to change cloud providers. This combination of open source and Kubernetes delivers what executives expect from a multi-cloud environment: predictable costs, consistent operations, and the freedom to decide where data resides.
Turning strategy into action
Multi-cloud success starts with leadership, not tools. It’s about making smart decisions that keep costs predictable, ensure resilience, and protect your freedom to choose. Here’s where to start:
Mandate portability. Require every new system to answer one question: Could we move this database in 90 days? If the answer is no, it’s not truly portable.
Standardize on Kubernetes. Make Kubernetes the default, unified platform for all workloads, including your stateful data. Consistency is what makes multi-cloud practical at scale.
Prioritize open source. Choose vendor-neutral databases to keep flexibility and prevent hidden licensing or feature restrictions.
Centralize visibility. Use a unified observability platform, such as Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), to track performance and spend across every environment.
Audit and target waste. Identify your most expensive proprietary database services and evaluate their lock-in risk. These are the first candidates for re-platforming.
A deliberate multi-cloud strategy starts with these principles. Each step ensures your architecture serves your business, not your cloud vendor.
Control is the strategy
Multi-cloud is about regaining control over your costs, resilience, and architectural freedom. Proprietary cloud services make operations simple in the short term, but they create a dependence that limits your options later.
Open source databases on Kubernetes offer a unified, consistent framework for running your data anywhere, with full transparency, no license barriers, and no vendor dictating how or where you deploy. That is the foundation of a real, sustainable multi-cloud strategy.
To put this strategy into motion, explore real-world approaches for reducing cloud spend and building a data architecture that you control end-to-end.
Read our research paper, Take Back Control of Your Databases, to explore full TCO models and a step-by-step framework for building a future-ready data platform.
Check out our webinar Running Databases in the Cloud: How to Reduce Infrastructure Costs Using Open Source Components and Kubernetes for tips on cutting cloud waste and improving efficiency.
