Book excerpt: This book discusses various aspects of the multi-cloud paradigm. The initial portion of the book focuses on the motivations for the industry to embrace a multi-cloud option and the distinct business, technology, and user cases of multi-cloud implementations. The middle part of the book explains the challenges of setting up and sustaining multi-cloud environments. The latter portion focuses on the next-generation technologies and tools along with multi-cloud platforms, processes, patterns, and practices. The final segment of the book is dedicated for cloud brokerage systems. The various traits and tenets of cloud brokerage services especially for accomplishing cloud intermediation, integration, orchestration, governance, security, management, configuration, etc. are explained in detail. The book also clearly articulates how to have intelligent brokers.