Recently, after the last major AWS/Azure outage, we realized that none of us really knew what would fail if our primary cloud region went down for a few hours. Though we have multi-AZ setups, backups, and health checks—everything we've been told is standard—we depend on a single provider. When we ask tough questions like what happens if IAM, S3, or DNS fail in that region, things get complicated. Surprisingly, a lot of our so-called redundant systems heavily rely on the same services. Even our monitoring solutions are not as isolated as assumed. I'm curious about how other teams handle this risk. Do you actively simulate outages, or do you just hope nothing goes wrong? How do you identify what's genuinely redundant versus what isn't? Have any of you found effective ways to gain visibility into dependencies without completely switching to multi-cloud strategies? And finally, when an outage does occur, what do you find the trickiest—detecting the issue, failing over to backups, or explaining the situation to management?
6 Answers
We have a multi-cloud strategy for our critical systems. For less critical systems with lower availability needs, we accept that outages will happen occasionally. It's about balancing risk with operational needs!
Honestly, I don't stress about it. When an outage happens, we just wait for everything to come back up. Even if we're online, if others in the region are down, we're stuck anyway. Why bother with a backup plan when everyone around us is experiencing issues?
Your assumptions might not hold up in reality. We've faced scenarios where services in one region became inaccessible due to authentication components located in another. Even if the data is intact, if access is cut off, that could render your entire service useless. True disaster recovery requires significant investment and planning that most people don't account for.
You'd be surprised how often the main and backup lines can go down simultaneously, especially if they use the same backbone. Being dependent on external vendors can leave you in a tough spot during outages. Testing can only take you so far; many scenarios are hard to predict.
It’s vital to understand your SaaS providers' backends as they play a critical role in your redundancy strategy. You should closely review their documentation for any hidden dependencies on underlying infrastructure.
We actually perform disaster recovery tests annually. During these tests, we cut off the connection to our primary region to see what fails. We usually have to fix anything that doesn't work and re-test it before the next yearly test. For some high-priority applications, we even rotate them between regions quarterly to ensure they're working optimally across the board.
In finance, our disaster recovery testing is mandated to be done annually as well—it's a regulatory requirement. However, the process can feel a bit theatrical. By the time test day rolls around, everyone has their plans in motion, but when we actually switch over, it's usually pretty smooth. Still, the reality is that these tests don't accurately reflect a real data center failure.
You really think regional competitors won't be affected if they're using shared services? It seems risky to assume that everyone else is in the same boat as you without considering other options like different providers or self-hosted systems.