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At that point, you'll need to have multiple regions in play, and some sort of mechanism to direct traffic to regions when one becomes unreachable (for most peop

At that point, you'll need to have multiple regions in play, and some sort of mechanism to direct traffic to regions when one becomes unreachable (for most people on AWS, this will be Route53). Devil's advocate, though: if you're concerned about what to do in the event of an AWS regional failure, given how rare an event that is, then you've probably outgrown AWS. (For most small-to-medium sized startups, I'd advocate setting up statuspage.io and keeping your users informed if you're single homed to an AWS region and that region experiences a catastrophic failure. The math on "how much money you'll lose from the outage" vs. "how much you need to spend implementing proper DR, better than what AWS has in place to keep a region up and running" isn't even close, assuming, say, 1 8 hour regional outage every ~2 years.)

jewel 11y ago
A B2B startup of any size will have a very hard time if those 8 hours are during business hours. Depending on the nature of the service, of course. Where I work now (a small web-based software-as-a-service) an 8 hour outage would be catastrophic, and could easily kill the business. The switching cost for our niche is small, so one bad day could cost us 20% of our clients. We're not running with a 20% profit yet, so at best it'd mean an immediate layoff or across-the-board temporary paycut. Luckily, because we're small we can run on a single LAMP server. We're working on making it so that we can migrate that to any region in EC2 with a single command, as well as making sure we can switch to a different dedicated hosting provider with minimal time.