There’s a familiar quip that the cloud is just someone else's computer. Although that’s true — to a certain extent — it doesn't convey how many options software architects have when using “someone else’s computer.” Since the early 2000s, the number of cloud computing providers and services has exponentially increased, and developers use them extensively. As a result, today we find ourselves deploying and managing distributed applications across multiple clouds. \r\n The agility of distributed architectures \r\n Distributed architectures provide added agility, as many experts have shown. Architects Martin Fowler and James Lewis wrote a great resource on the topic, which many consider definitive. I also sat down with one of IBM's senior architects to discuss the benefits of dividing a monolithic application into microservices — even while the application is still in production.  \r\n That same agility is one of the reasons why developers make use of multiple clouds.…