Over the past several months, outages at AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare have been a stark reminder: cloud services are powerful, but they are not infallible. Too often, teams misinterpret the reliability of cloud platforms and overlook their own responsibility in building resilient systems.

The Value of the Cloud

Let’s be clear—cloud providers deliver incredible value. Having managed a data center myself, I know firsthand the relief of not having to maintain racks of servers, cooling systems, and endless hardware replacements. The cloud abstracts away much of that pain and enables developers to focus on building solutions instead of babysitting infrastructure.

Reliability vs. Resiliency

Here’s the catch: reliability and resiliency are not the same thing, and too much weight is being placed on the providers alone. Yes, AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare engineer their platforms for resilience. But their guarantees—“99.99% availability”—still fall short of perfection. Hardware fails. Networks degrade. Services stall. Outages happen, and when they do, they can hit hard.

The responsibility doesn’t end with the provider. It’s on us, the developers and architects, to design for resiliency in our own solutions.

Planning for the Inevitable

If you deploy to the cloud, assume it will fail. Then plan accordingly:

• Disaster Recovery (DR): Architect for regional outages. Have a failover plan ready to spin up workloads in another region or provider.
• Performance Degradation: Build strategies for graceful degradation when services slow down. Don’t let one bottleneck grind your entire system to a halt.
• Network Dependencies: Pay special attention to DNS. If your solution relies on resolving URLs, plan for what happens when DNS hiccups.
• Failure Scenarios: If you can imagine a failure, expect it. Hardware, APIs, authentication, networking—every layer is a potential point of failure.

The mindset should be simple: expect the worst, hope for the best.

Final Thoughts

Cloud providers are amazing, but they are not magic. Outages are inevitable, and resiliency is a shared responsibility. As developers, we must stop treating the cloud as a silver bullet and start treating it as a powerful tool—one that still requires careful planning, redundancy, and foresight.