The quest for availability in the cloud

How many nines of happiness are your customers?

In this series of posts, I will walk you through architecting, building and deploying a large scale, multi-region, active-active architecture — all while trying to break it.

The idea is to split the series into the following structure:

1. The Quest for Availability (this one)
2. How to build a multi-region active-active architecture on AWS (published here)
3. Building a Multi-Region, Active-Active Serverless Backend (published here)
4. Building a Multi-Region, Active-Active Serverless Backend — within a VPC (published here)
5. Multi-Region reloaded: Accelerating Serverless Applications with Global Accelerator and Application Load Balancer (published here)

Of course — the structure might and probably will change as I continue writing and get your feedback, so feel free to steer the course of (t)his (s)tory in the comments below :)

System failure

One of my favorite quotes that influenced my thinking of software engineering is from Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com.

“Failures are a given and everything will eventually fail over…