The future demands that enterprises leverage multi-cloud resources to automate their business operations successfully. The cloud journey thus far is a roller coaster ride. Clouds are typically online, on-demand, and off-premises. There are public, private, and hybrid clouds to comfortably cater to different regions and requirements. There are a number of purpose-centric and agnostic clouds (local and remote) consisting of a growing array of compute resources, such as bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers. The other prominent cloud resources include storage, networking, and security solutions. There is another noteworthy development. There are edge/fog device clouds emerging and evolving quickly due to the conscious adoption of the edge/fog computing paradigm. Multi-faceted devices in our everyday environments (personal and professional) are being meticulously clubbed together through middleware solutions to form pioneering fog/device clouds. The edge device clouds are to fulfill the need for real-time data capture, cleansing, and crunching. These produce real-time and actionable insights, which in turn loop back to various actuating devices and applications to adroitly attend people-centric, environment-specific, and time-sensitive tasks. Thus, the cloud journey, without an iota of doubt, is on the right track. It is not an exaggeration to say that the cloud paradigm is being positioned as the one-stop IT solution for all kinds of business evolutions and revolutions.

In the recent past, there has been avid interest by worldwide enterprises in embracing a multi-cloud strategy, which is being termed as the safest and smartest move for business organizations. With the appropriate technologies and tools for crafting hybrid clouds becoming solidified, the move towards employing multiple clouds for hosting and running various business workloads is garnering a more subtle and solid attention. This chapter is therefore dedicated to convey why a multi-cloud approach is gaining unprecedented market and mind shares. Furthermore, to ensure service resilience, we need a couple of infrastructures.

In this chapter, we will be learning about the following:

• Digital transformation
• Cloud-native and enabled applications for the digital era
• Service mesh solutions
• Microservices API Gateway
• The journey toward containerized cloud environments
• The growing solidity of the Kubernetes platform for containerized clouds