Multi-Cloud Deployment Guide

RedC's core strength is deploying infrastructure across multiple clouds simultaneously. This skill covers the practical knowledge needed to work across providers — from authentication setup to region selection to cross-cloud consistency patterns. Understanding these differences matters because each cloud has its own authentication model, naming conventions, and regional availability, and getting any of these wrong means a deployment that fails at plan time.

Provider Authentication

Each cloud provider authenticates differently. Set these environment variables before running RedC, or configure them in RedC's credential profiles.

Provider	Required Environment Variables	Notes
AWS	AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID + AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Or use ~/.aws/credentials profile
Azure	ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID + ARM_TENANT_ID + ARM_CLIENT_ID + ARM_CLIENT_SECRET	Service principal recommended
GCP	GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS (path to JSON)	Service account key file
Alibaba Cloud	ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY + ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY	China mainland requires real-name verification
Tencent Cloud	TENCENTCLOUD_SECRET_ID + TENCENTCLOUD_SECRET_KEY	SecretId, not AccessKey
Huawei Cloud	HW_ACCESS_KEY + HW_SECRET_KEY	Regional endpoints differ from global
Volcengine	VOLCENGINE_ACCESS_KEY + VOLCENGINE_SECRET_KEY	ByteDance cloud platform

Note the naming inconsistency — AWS uses "access key", Tencent uses "secret id", GCP uses a JSON file. This is a common source of confusion. When helping users configure credentials, pay attention to which provider they're targeting.

Region Selection Strategy

Region choice affects latency, cost, data residency, and instance availability. Pick based on your primary constraint:

Proximity to target (red team operations): Choose the region geographically closest to the target network. A C2 server in ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo) communicating with targets in Japan will have much lower latency than one in us-east-1.

Cost minimization:

• AWS: us-east-1 (N. Virginia) is almost always cheapest
• Azure: eastus has the widest instance selection and lowest pricing
• GCP: us-central1 (Iowa) offers the best spot pricing
• Chinese clouds: cn-hangzhou (Alibaba), ap-guangzhou (Tencent) are the primary regions with best availability

High availability: Distribute across 2+ regions in the same provider, or across providers. RedC's multi-cloud templates make this straightforward.

Cross-Cloud Consistency

When deploying the same tool across multiple clouds, standardize these elements to reduce operational complexity:

• OS: Use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS everywhere. It's available on all providers and most red team tools support it
• Init scripts: Use cloud-init / user_data for post-deploy configuration. The syntax is identical across providers
• Naming conventions: Use a consistent prefix like redc-{project}-{provider}-{role} so you can identify resources at a glance
• Instance sizing: Each provider has different naming, but roughly equivalent tiers:

Size	AWS	Azure	GCP	Alibaba
Small (2c/4G)	t3.medium	B2s	e2-medium	ecs.t6-c1m2.large
Medium (4c/8G)	t3.xlarge	B4ms	e2-standard-4	ecs.g6.xlarge

Cost Control Across Clouds

Multi-cloud deployments multiply cost risk because you need to track spending across separate billing dashboards.

• Use spot/preemptible instances for non-critical workloads (scanning, data processing)
• Set billing alerts on every cloud account — a forgotten instance in one provider can silently drain budget
• Use RedC's get_balances tool to check all accounts at once
• Use RedC's scheduled task feature for auto-shutdown when engagements end