I usually advise my clients to treat cloud providers like they would treat hardware, perhaps a bit more reliable (though in practice that is usually not the cas

I usually advise my clients to treat cloud providers like they would treat hardware, perhaps a bit more reliable (though in practice that is usually not the case.) If you cannot afford for your database to unavailable, invest in creating a backup db for your database. That advice holds regardless of whether said database is run on a cloud or not. Base your investment decisions on the downtime you observe of the cloud provider. Don't expect to make your cloud provider magically able to ensure your app has n 9s reliability. That's on you.