Cloud Agnostic: Can You or Can’t You?

Cloud Agnostic vs. Cloud Native

Everyone’s talking about it.
Cloud Agnostic is the new holy grail of architecture. No lock-in. Total freedom. Move from AWS to Azure, from GCP to on-prem, without rewriting a single line of code.

But let’s cut through the noise:
Can you really pull it off?

At CIRIACOSSL, we build systems with high-impact outcomes. And the answer is simple:

Yes, you can be cloud agnostic. But not always. And definitely not for free.

Let’s be honest: native services are addictive

Cloud providers make it easy to ship fast. Serverless? API Gateways? Managed everything?
Perfect — until you try to leave.

We’ve seen teams build fast on AWS only to realize a year later they’ve built on AWS, not for users.
What started as a shortcut turned into a long-term tax.

The Agnostic Illusion

Most teams that try to be 100% cloud agnostic end up with:

More infrastructure code
Slower releases
Underused services
Higher costs
And ironically… less flexibility

You start writing your own glue code to avoid vendor lock-in — and guess what?
Now you’re the vendor you can’t get rid of.

The Pricing Trap No One Expects

Here’s the quiet risk no one wants to talk about:

If your architecture is tied too closely to a single cloud provider, even a small price shift can become a big problem.

Imagine your provider changes egress pricing by 2¢ per GB. Or raises object storage retrieval costs by 5%.
Those are rounding errors — until you’re operating at scale.

Now multiply that across 20 services, 4 environments, and thousands of users.
Your margins just vanished.

Being locked in means being vulnerable. Even a subtle pricing tweak can break your business model.

So when does it actually make sense?

At CIRIACOSSL, we don’t believe in cargo culting strategies.
We believe in context.

Being cloud agnostic makes sense when:

You’re building a SaaS platform deployed in different clouds
You’re in regulated industries where vendor neutrality is non-negotiable
You’re preparing for an exit and want to maximize valuation by reducing cloud dependency
You’re playing the cloud arbitrage game to optimize performance and cost

In other words: it’s a strategy. Not a religion.

Our take: Optionality beats Ideology

We don’t say no to cloud-native.
We say yes to strategic portability.

How?

Use containers, K3s/K8s, and GitOps to keep workloads portable
Separate app logic from cloud-specific configs
Use Terraform and modular IaC to stay flexible
Embrace multi-cloud only when your business needs it — not because Twitter says so

Agnosticism is not about rejecting cloud providers.
It’s about being in control — no matter where you run.

Final words

Can you be cloud agnostic?
Absolutely.

Should you?
Only if it serves your business. Not your ego.

At CIRIACOSSL, we help you build platforms that are flexible, resilient, and future-proof — without overengineering your stack.

Because true freedom isn’t in avoiding the cloud.
It’s in not depending on it.