Multicloud mastery: How to train teams in AWS, Azure, and GCP

Several studies point to the same conclusion: Multicloud is no longer a fringe strategy. It’s the new normal. 

For technical leaders, this may not be surprising. After all, many organizations that adopt multiple clouds see improvements in:

• Risk mitigation and vendor neutrality

• Regulatory and compliance flexibility

• Performance and cost optimization across regions

• Innovation acceleration through best-of-breed services

But multicloud mastery comes with its own challenges, specifically skills fragmentation and tool overload.

When organizations adopt multiple clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP, the range of platforms, tools, and services can quickly overwhelm teams. How do you upskill your engineers to design, build, and operate confidently across them?

By developing cross-platform expertise, your teams become more resilient, more innovative, and less dependent on any one vendor. Here’s how to build multicloud expertise and develop a modern cloud organization. 

As a leader, there are several approaches you can take to skill up your teams. A structured roadmap can help them get ready to take on multicloud. Here's the high-level framework:

Now let’s dive into each of these four areas. 

The first step is to analyze your team’s current capabilities. Depending on your team’s size, you can do this through a survey, a focused discussion, or one-on-one conversations. 

Talk through the cloud platforms your organization plans to adopt and ask team members whether they have experience with those providers.

For those who say yes, ask about: 

• Past projects: Have they worked on projects involving the cloud platform(s)?

• Cloud certifications: Do they hold any cloud certifications? Which ones? 

• Proficiency levels: How skilled are they in each cloud? Use internal assessments, hands-on labs, or sandbox exercises to validate their responses.

Once you’ve assessed your team’s current skill set, identify gaps across the three major clouds: AWS, Azure, and GCP. These gaps help you understand where your team needs to ramp up. They should become the focus of your multicloud upskilling strategy. 

From there, segment your team based on roles or responsibilities. Common segments include foundational cloud users, builders, architects, and site reliability engineers (SREs). Once segmented, you can drill deeper into the specific skills each group needs to succeed in a multicloud environment.

Lastly, consider establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (COE) that spans all segments. This group can offer best practices, internal guidance, and support as teams grow their cloud expertise.

In this phase, start with the fundamentals and cloud concepts that apply across all three major platforms. For example, your team members should understand the difference between IaaS and PaaS, what cloud regions and availability zones are, and the basics of networking, identity, and cost management.

It’s critical to build a strong foundation in vendor-neutral cloud knowledge. Make sure your team is solid on the core concepts before diving into the platform-specific details such as:

• AWS: IAM, EC2, Lambda, CloudFormation

• Azure: RBAC, Virtual Machines, Functions, Bicep/ARM

• GCP: IAM, Compute Engine, Cloud Functions, Deployment Manager

This is just a starting point. The image below offers a slightly more detailed view of the categories you should cover across the top three cloud platforms, along with representative services for each.

After the assessment and training phases, the next step is to provide your team with hands-on practice. This is where team members can move beyond theory and start gaining real experience with cloud platforms.

One of the best ways to encourage hands-on learning is by setting up sandbox accounts for each cloud provider. Make sure to allocate a reasonable budget so your team has the freedom to explore services, test ideas, and build in each environment without restrictions.

Learn more about Pluralsight’s cloud and AI sandboxes.

Another effective approach is to organize game days or hackathons that feature cross-cloud challenges. These events not only reinforce learning but also boost team engagement by creating a fun, competitive environment to apply their new skills.

Want more upskilling strategies? Check out our Tech Upskilling Playbook.

As your team gains experience, they will quickly recognize the need to automate infrastructure. This is where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) comes in. IaC allows teams to define, provision, and manage cloud resources consistently and efficiently.

Among the various IaC tools available, Terraform stands out as one of the most widely used—and it supports all three major cloud platforms. Other tools like Pulumi and Crossplane are cloud-agnostic options worth exploring.

Encouraging your team to learn and use IaC reinforces transferable skills across AWS, Azure, and GCP while building a more scalable and consistent approach to managing cloud infrastructure.

Now that you've assessed your team’s skills, provided core training, and given them hands-on experience with each cloud platform, the next step is to encourage certification. Each cloud provider offers certification tracks that allow technical professionals to demonstrate their expertise and validate their cloud knowledge.

Beginner-level certifications are a great entry point into the cloud certification journey. Examples include:

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

• Google Cloud Digital Leader

There are also vendor-agnostic certifications such as CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ and CompTIA Cloud+ which cover general cloud fundamentals and can serve as an excellent foundation before diving into vendor-specific paths.

To make it easier for your team to pursue certifications, consider allocating a budget for exam fees. Removing the cost barrier can go a long way in motivating team members to study and follow through.

As team members build their skills, use platform-native certifications from AWS, Azure, and GCP as progress checkpoints. This helps ensure your team is truly building their skills across the different clouds in a measurable and structured way.

In conclusion, adopting a multicloud strategy comes with its challenges, and upskilling your team across multiple platforms is a big one. But with the right strategy and mindset, it’s absolutely achievable. 

Hopefully, this post gave you a solid head start and a practical path to help your technical teams ramp up their multicloud capabilities.

To recap, here are the next steps for you:

• Invest in building a multicloud-capable team. It pays off.

• Encourage your teams to focus on core cloud principles, not just getting familiar with each cloud's console.

• Don’t wait. Start skilling up today and launch your team's multicloud journey with a pilot training plan this quarter.

Good luck with your multi-cloud journey.

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