What's DR other than migrating onto what's hoped to be (but never is) an identical setup? It's like having your Amazon fallback be ... Amazon in another region.

What's DR other than migrating onto what's hoped to be (but never is) an identical setup? It's like having your Amazon fallback be ... Amazon in another region. That protects you against localized outages but not design failures or systematic outages or incompatibilities in new versions of your stack. And it takes time to keep your DR plan up to date, patch the VMs, etc, and test it. Almost like this migration plan I'm talking about. > The only thing the cloud offers me is the ability to change my CapEx spends into OpEx spends. Ehh, not really. You can setup load-balancer pools larger than your entire colo, or use a globe-spanning backbone to create datasets that auto-replicate worldwide. And which are usually much easier than setting these services up yourself, let alone building the multiple zones. If the cloud is just a big colo to you then you probably shouldn't use the cloud. It's frightfully expensive.