Multicloud in 2025: Comparing Hybrid Infrastructure Approaches

This blog is called multicloud.is, and while I’ve spent the past year and a half primarily writing about Azure Local and the Dell ecosystem around it, it feels overdue to step back and look at the broader hybrid infrastructure landscape. What are the options? How do they compare? Where does Azure Local fit relative to the alternatives? I’ll try to be as balanced as I can here, while being transparent about where my experience and perspective lie.

The Landscape

The major hybrid infrastructure offerings from the big three cloud providers, plus the independent players, give customers more choice than at any point in the past decade.

Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI) is Microsoft’s hybrid infrastructure platform. It runs on validated hardware from OEMs like Dell, and projects on-premises infrastructure into Azure through Azure Arc. The management plane is Azure, the APIs are Azure, and the operational experience is designed to be consistent with Azure public cloud. It supports VMs, AKS, Azure Virtual Desktop, and an expanding set of Azure services running locally.

AWS Outposts is Amazon’s equivalent. Outposts brings AWS hardware and services into your data centre, running AWS compute and storage locally with a connection back to the AWS region for management and control plane operations. It comes in rack and server form factors, and supports EC2 instances, EBS storage, and a growing set of AWS services locally.

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) is Google’s offering, available in connected, edge, and air-gapped variants. GDC runs on certified hardware and brings GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), Anthos, and selected Google Cloud services to on-premises and edge locations.

Nutanix Cloud Platform is the primary independent player. It provides a hyperconverged infrastructure platform with its own control plane (Prism), its own hypervisor (AHV), and integrations with multiple public clouds. It’s not tied to any single cloud provider, which is both its strength and its limitation.

How They Compare

Let me break this down across a few dimensions that matter most to customers making this choice.

Management Model

Azure Local is managed through Azure. Full stop. Your on-premises clusters show up in the Azure portal alongside your public cloud resources. Policies, RBAC, monitoring, updates, all flow through the same management plane. The upside is consistency. The downside is dependency on Azure.

AWS Outposts is managed through the AWS console. Same principle, different cloud. Your Outpost resources appear alongside your AWS resources, managed by the same IAM, CloudWatch, and Systems Manager tools.

Google Distributed Cloud in its connected variant is managed through the Google Cloud console. The air-gapped variant has a local management interface, which is an interesting differentiator for sovereign scenarios.

Nutanix is managed through Prism, its own management plane. This makes it cloud-agnostic, which is appealing if you genuinely want to avoid dependency on any single cloud provider. The trade-off is that you’re managing a separate management plane that doesn’t natively integrate with any public cloud’s control plane.

Hardware Model

Azure Local runs on OEM hardware from Dell, Lenovo, HPE, and others. You choose your hardware partner, and the solution is validated and supported as a combined offering. Dell AX with Premier Solution status represents the highest tier of this model.

AWS Outposts is AWS hardware. Amazon designs it, ships it to you, installs it, and maintains it. You don’t choose the hardware, you consume it as a service. This simplifies some decisions but removes flexibility.

Google Distributed Cloud uses certified hardware from partners, similar to the Azure Local model but with a smaller set of certified configurations.

Nutanix runs on hardware from most major server vendors, giving you the broadest hardware choice but with varying levels of integration and validation depending on the vendor.

Workload Support

All four platforms support VMs and containers. Azure Local adds Azure Virtual Desktop and is bringing Microsoft 365 workloads. AWS Outposts supports a broad set of AWS services including RDS, ECS, and EMR. Google Distributed Cloud focuses heavily on Kubernetes and AI/ML workloads. Nutanix supports VMs on AHV and has Kubernetes integration through NKE.

Sovereignty and Disconnected Operations

This is where the platforms diverge most significantly. Azure Local is investing heavily in disconnected operations and sovereign cloud scenarios. Google Distributed Cloud’s air-gapped variant addresses similar requirements. AWS Outposts requires a persistent connection to the parent AWS region, which limits its applicability in truly disconnected or sovereign scenarios. Nutanix can operate fully independently since its management plane is local.

My Take

Every one of these platforms has scenarios where it’s the right choice. The decision should be driven by your existing cloud investments, your workload requirements, your sovereignty needs, and your operational preferences.

If you’re an Azure shop, Azure Local is the natural extension. The management consistency, the Azure Arc integration, and the expanding set of Azure services running locally make it the obvious choice for organisations already invested in the Azure ecosystem. Dell AX with Premier Solution status provides the hardware assurance layer on top.

If you’re an AWS shop, Outposts provides similar consistency with the AWS ecosystem. The managed hardware model is appealing if you want to treat on-premises infrastructure as a fully managed service.

If sovereignty and air-gapped operation are primary requirements, Azure Local and Google Distributed Cloud are currently ahead of the curve, with Nutanix also capable by virtue of its independent management plane.

If you genuinely want to avoid cloud provider dependency, Nutanix gives you the most flexibility, at the cost of managing a separate ecosystem.

The Real Multicloud

Here’s what I think the honest multicloud conversation looks like in 2025. Most organisations will standardise on one primary cloud provider for the majority of their workloads, and extend that provider’s management model to their on-premises infrastructure. True multi-provider architectures, where different clouds are used deliberately for different workloads based on capability and policy, exist, but they’re more complex and expensive to operate than vendor marketing would have you believe.

The most pragmatic approach is to choose your primary cloud, extend it on-premises with the corresponding hybrid platform, and use additional clouds deliberately and sparingly for specific capabilities that your primary provider doesn’t offer. That’s not as exciting as the “run anything anywhere” vision, but it’s realistic, and it’s what the most successful organisations I work with are actually doing.