On Tue, 21 Oct 2025, Jeff Shultz via Outages-discussion wrote:
Truly fault tolerant is not budget friendly.
Having worked for AWS, and having run multi-region fault-tolerant systems for many years, it *can* be budget-friendly, if you are willing to put in the effort and planning. I can find two different hosting companies that offer bare-metal hosting, and confirm that both are using a different mix of connectivity on different ASNs, and are in geographically different areas. I can deploy my workload across those systems, reducing risk, but also have the workload spread across those disparate systems, so I don't need to double my infrastructure costs. This is even possible in AWS -- they provide multiple tools for multi-region and multi-AZ deployments. When I worked for AWS my team built AMI Copy in 2012/2013, so you could move AMIs between regions with an API call, making it easier to start up new EC2 instances with your existing images. RDS has cross-region read-replicas. DynamoDB was built with multi-region in mind. You DO need to assume and plan that a whole AZ or Region will go dark, and if your systems just immediately fail when that happens, then you've done a less-than-ideal job of building your systems to be fault-tolerant. Yes, it adds complexity and you have to test regularly, but it does NOT need to add huge amounts of additional costs. You just need to know what you're doing. Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com https://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------