I think people overestimate the importance of failures of the underlying cloud platform. One of the most surprising lessons of the last 5 years at my company ha

I think people overestimate the importance of failures of the underlying cloud platform. One of the most surprising lessons of the last 5 years at my company has been how rarely single points of failure actually fail. A simple load-balanced group of EC2 instances, pointed at a single RDS Postgres database, is astonishingly reliable. If you get fancy and build a multi-master system, you can easily end up creating more downtime than you prevent when your own failover/recovery system runs amok.