> What’s everyone’s back up plans? Just a ‘We’ll be right back’ page? I've done a lot of cloud site HA work on large sites. Waiting out the cloud outage so f

> What’s everyone’s back up plans? Just a ‘We’ll be right back’ page? I've done a lot of cloud site HA work on large sites. Waiting out the cloud outage so far ends up being the best solution for almost all companies, from both engineering and business standpoints. Eat the outage, but continue with a known-working site afterwards. You just blame the cloud provider for the downtime. > I've heard of larger companies running a completely redundant hot standby on another independent cloud platform and switching DNS over to the standby when something goes wrong. In theory, that makes sense. It practise, it almost never works. If by "independent cloud platform" you mean another AZ or region in the same cloud, that is often attempted and can work reasonably well. If you mean failover from AWS to GCP, then that's unlikely, since everything is different. An example is whenever DynDNS goes down for 2-3 hours, and everybody builds out flaky failover tools that are less reliable than their original DNS provider - and have to be maintained forever. Might work with one or two domains, becomes a huge ongoing problem with dozens of them. Also, DNS mgmt. APIs are flaky in several dimensions (availability, versioning, parameters, etc.) Another is that you can't failover to another location that doesn't have all your data, current certificates, monitoring, etc., and the failover site needs the capacity of the original site to work. That costs ongoing money and time, and you never know how well the failover will work or how it will perform. An example is Heartland, one of the biggest US payment providers, who failed over to another location and took a 5 day outage. Or gitlab, who took a one day outage because of database isues. I have (automatically) failed over a large site for a publicly-traded company from one AWS region to another, but that took a year of work to setup, and I understood almost all aspects of the site. Afterwards, I realized that almost nobody really has time to organize that either at a conceptual or engineering level. And organizations don't recognize Herculean efforts like that, so think twice beforehand. Key point: always involve your DBA from the beginning when doing a project like this.