Cloud Hedging: What the AWS Outage Taught Us About Resilience
This week, AWS had a rough day. If you were trying to check in at the airport, play Fortnite, or send a message on Slack, you might’ve noticed things weren’t working quite right. The culprit? A major outage in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region that disrupted services across industries.
It’s a stark reminder of something many in tech know but don’t always act on. Relying on a single cloud provider, or even a single region, is a risk.
Cloud Hedging vs. Regional Failover: A Strategic Choice
Most cloud-native businesses implement east/west failover… replicating workloads across multiple regions within the same provider. It’s a solid strategy, but it has limits. The AWS outage showed that even services hosted in unaffected regions can go down if they rely on shared services like DNS, IAM, or DynamoDB in the impacted region.
Multi-cloud hedging goes further. It distributes workloads across different cloud providers. AWS, Azure, GCP… reducing dependency on any single ecosystem. But it’s not a silver bullet.
The Realities of Multi-Cloud Hedging
While multi-cloud offers stronger resilience, it also introduces complexity:
Service Compatibility: Not all services are easily portable. For example, AWS Lambda and Azure Functions aren’t 1:1 interchangeable. Re-architecting serverless applications across providers can be costly and time-consuming.
Data Replication: Keeping data consistent across clouds requires robust replication strategies and careful consideration of latency, compliance, and cost.
Operational Overhead: Managing multiple platforms means more tooling, more training, and more governance.
Cost vs. Criticality: Not every workload needs multi-cloud redundancy. The key is identifying critical services where downtime is unacceptable and architecting those for cross-provider resilience.
Where Simplify Consulting Comes In
At Simplify Consulting, we help organisations design cloud strategies that are resilient by default. Whether you’re starting fresh or looking to evolve your existing setup, we can:
- Assess your current cloud architecture for points of failure
- Design multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud solutions tailored to your business needs
- Implement failover and redundancy strategies that actually work when things go wrong
- Train your teams to manage and monitor multi-cloud environments effectively
Let’s Talk
If this week’s outage directly impacted your operation or made you rethink your cloud setup, let’s have a conversation. Whether you’re curious about cloud hedging or ready to take action, we’re here to help.
Nick Clarke
Practice Director
