> We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft
You will be threatened by your own unreliability of building something that's dependant on one region or one cloud.
You will be threatened by your own unreliability of building something that's dependant on one region or one cloud.
I just watched the second video on the page, and it does discuss multi-region a bit.
At least on AWS you typically can find capacity (outside of accelerators) by being flexible on instance types (C, M, R), instance sizes, and availability zones. Sounds like this region OP is in for Azure is constrained such that even this advice doesn’t work.
I suspect that the skills for real HA are atrophying because for 99% of the people multi-AZ is enough and most of the AWS stuff supports multi-az automagically.
The problem with multi-region is that it means configuration, and there are probably lots of services that you can't actually configure to be multi-region. Cognito is one off the top of my head. It looks like the various aurora flavors do multi-region, but what about Neptune? SQS? API Gateway? AWS Lambda? MediaLive?
Maybe you can hide all that behind DNS failover, maybe you can't.
Real multi-region is basically means going back to old-school HA, and that was hard to do when it was your data centers. On AWS it'll be even harder.
That isn't to say it's not possible, it's just a tremendous amount of work.
I mean really, if us-east-1 is down 80% of the internet is screwed...so from an expectations point of view does HA of your particular service matter if that happens? Even for a financial outages happen.
Once you have enough people it might be worth it. For a non mission critical startup? No fucking way.
Everything is for sure until it’s not.
This has vast benefits for agility and fast development when developers are not always fighting the build system and have a "no fear" attitude about deployment.
If you have that, you can build a system in another region and be able to migrate wholesale to another region with more capacity and not be particularly concerned about the general problem of coordinating the service across multiple regions at the same time.
For some clouds that seem to be run on a manual process (IBM, Oracle) that would be expected, since they're sort of clunky. For other places (Rackspace, etc) it would uncommon. For a major provider like Azure, well, it's bizarre. I mean, the whole point of cloud is that it's all-you-can-eat.
You would think that this would be something they would advertise/talk about up-front. But who would sign up if that was disclosed?