Build resilient apps: do not rely solely on cloud infrastructure

Organizations building cloud applications cannot rely solely on cloud provider infrastructure for resiliency. Instead, they need to architect their applications to survive occasional service and data center outages. An application’s availability, cost and guaranteed service level depend on its architecture. Enterprises moving to the cloud should consider the additional resources (and costs) needed to make the application suitably available.

KEY POINTS

• Cloud provider data centers and services will occasionally fail. Organizations need to architect resiliency into their applications or risk downtime without meaningful compensation.
• The key to increasing availability is distributing workloads across availability zones (data centers) and regions (collections of nearby data centers).
• Duplicating resources also duplicates costs. Enterprises moving to the cloud need to consider the additional requirements to ensure adequate application availability.