It took me some time to realize that Cloud Solution Architects are also just slightly more technical sales people in disguise whose only mission is upselling you onto more dependency. Same thing about their PR, every CxO these days says they need "multi-cloud", whatever that means and the costs are usually enormous, while complexity rises — with questionable benefit.
I did the math for our own stack and after a setback month in client revenue, and decided to put all our servers into a single AZ in a single region. The only multi-AZ, multi-region services are our backups. Surviving bad machines happens often enough that it's priced in via using Kubernetes, but losing a whole AZ is a freak accident that's just SO rare that calculating real business risk, it seemed apt to pretend it just doesn't happen (sorry, Google Cloud Paris customers).
Call me reckless, but I haven't looked back ever since and it saves us thousands of dollars in intra-AZ fees per month alone.
Yeah, for many businesses it probably isn't necessary to have crazy short RTO and RPO. Just restore the most recent backup in a new region and point at the cloud provider outage report...
I think there's this general problem with cloud deployments I'm seeing happen more and more:
People building this huge Multi AZ, Hyper Redundant, Multi-National, infinitly scaling Cloud Solution for something that requires a single VM and a Database.
Most Companies just don't need that level of scale and would be better off building something smaller and when you actually do scale you rewrite it with the profits made from the smaller solutions.
Of course there are many companies that do require something large but you should seriously consider if something smaller will do first.
I think solutions like a 100% cloudflare workers based backend can sidestep this a little but usually, that's not possibly or even the right thing in every situation.
I did the math for our own stack and after a setback month in client revenue, and decided to put all our servers into a single AZ in a single region. The only multi-AZ, multi-region services are our backups. Surviving bad machines happens often enough that it's priced in via using Kubernetes, but losing a whole AZ is a freak accident that's just SO rare that calculating real business risk, it seemed apt to pretend it just doesn't happen (sorry, Google Cloud Paris customers).
Call me reckless, but I haven't looked back ever since and it saves us thousands of dollars in intra-AZ fees per month alone.