One answer is to evaluate the uptime you get with a single cloud provider and figure out if it meets your needs. This outage means that for the year, GCE will

One answer is to evaluate the uptime you get with a single cloud provider and figure out if it meets your needs. This outage means that for the year, GCE will have at most a .999948 == four and a half "nines" of uptime. From a networkworld article in 2015: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-computing/which-cloud-providers-had-the-best-uptime-last-year.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866950/cloud-computing/... And 2015: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3020235/cloud-computing/and-the-cloud-provider-with-the-best-uptime-in-2015-is.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/3020235/cloud-computing/... The article quotes Ben Traynor as saying that Google aimed for and hit 99.95% uptime, which is 4.3 hours of downtime per year. My guess is that, despite cloud outages being painful, many applications are probably going to meet their cost/SLO goals anyway. Going up from 4 9s starts to get very expensive very quickly.