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Freedom251 › Blog › cloud outage

How to keep a website available during a cloud provider outage

By Freedom251 Team · · 10 min read

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Keep a website online during a cloud-provider outage by designing for the failure scope you need to survive, then testing an independent recovery path. Set a recovery time objective (RTO) for how quickly service must return and a recovery point objective (RPO) for how much recent data you can lose. Multi-zone deployment can contain a zone failure; a regional outage requires another region; a provider-wide outage may require a tested environment at a second provider. Traffic steering, data recovery, credentials, deployment artifacts and operating procedures must all work without depending on the failed environment.

Start with RTO and RPO

Availability architecture is a business decision before it is a cloud-product decision. Write down two limits:

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  • RTO (recovery time objective): the maximum acceptable time before the website is usable again.
  • RPO (recovery point objective): the maximum acceptable amount of recent data that may be lost or unavailable after recovery.

A brochure site with no user-generated content might accept an RTO of several hours and an RPO measured in hours. A checkout, booking or account site may need minutes for both, and may require a design that avoids losing committed transactions. Let customer harm, regulatory obligations, revenue loss and support capacity set these values; do not choose an architecture first and then retrofit objectives.

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Turn objectives into acceptance tests

Make each objective measurable. For example, “the homepage responds” is not enough if login, checkout, images, APIs, the database and administration are still unavailable. Define the transactions that must work, the data freshness required, who can declare a disaster and what evidence closes the incident.

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  • RTO test: from declaration to a successful, monitored user transaction.
  • RPO test: compare the newest acknowledged write at the primary site with the newest write present in the recovery site.
  • Dependency test: prove that operators can authenticate, obtain secrets, deploy artifacts and inspect logs without the failed provider.

Choose the failure scope you must survive

Zones, regions and providers are separate failure domains. Redundancy helps only when every resource required to serve the site remains in a surviving domain.

Zone failure

Availability zones are physically and operationally separated locations inside a region. Running application instances and managed data services across multiple zones can keep a site serving when one zone fails. It does not protect against a regional network, control-plane, identity, storage or managed-service incident that affects the whole region.

Regional failure

A single-region application may be unable to serve during a regional outage even when it is multi-zone. A second region provides a separate recovery location, but it must contain (or be able to obtain) the application, data, configuration, credentials, images and monitoring needed to operate.

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Provider-wide failure

A second region in the same provider can still share provider-level dependencies. If the requirement is to continue through a provider-wide disruption, a second provider is an option. It adds integration work, duplicated operating knowledge and inter-cloud data-transfer costs, so justify it with the impact and probability of the failure you are addressing. No independent cross-provider outage-frequency statistic establishes that one provider is more reliable than another.

Understand what availability targets mean

Google Cloud’s infrastructure reliability guide, last reviewed November 20, 2024, gives deployment design targets of 99.9% for single-zone, 99.99% for multi-zone and 99.999% for multi-region workloads. These are design targets, not a guarantee for every service or workload; service-specific contractual SLAs can differ.

Design target Approximate maximum downtime in a 30-day month Typical failure scope addressed
99.9% 43.2 minutes Single-zone design
99.99% 4.3 minutes Multi-zone design
99.999% 26 seconds Multi-region design

The downtime figures are arithmetic equivalents of the guide’s percentages, not independent incident statistics. An SLA is also not the same as your end-to-end availability: a provider may meet a product SLA while your DNS, application, database, deployment process or third-party dependency is failing.

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Compare recovery architectures

AWS disaster-recovery guidance commonly groups designs into backup and restore, standby (active/passive) and active/active. Compare them against RTO, RPO, readiness, complexity and cost rather than treating one pattern as universally best.

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Pattern How it works Strengths Trade-offs
Backup and restore Store backups and deployment artifacts outside the failed location, then create or restore capacity after an incident. Lowest ongoing cost; suitable for relaxed RTOs. Slowest recovery; restore duration and backup integrity determine the real RTO.
Standby (active/passive) Maintain a recovery environment that is scaled down or idle and promote it during failover. Faster than rebuilding; lower cost than running two full production sites. Capacity, software versions, permissions and data replication can drift while idle.
Active/active Serve traffic from two or more locations continuously, with data and traffic distributed between them. Fastest continuity and the ability to absorb a site loss. Highest cost and complexity; requires careful consistency, routing and write-conflict handling.

A warm standby is not automatically ready. If its image registry, identity service, encryption keys or database schema depends on the failed environment, it can fail at the moment it is needed.

Build redundancy in layers

Application and compute

Package the application as reproducible images or artifacts and keep those artifacts in a location accessible during a disaster. Deploy equivalent versions in the recovery scope, including runtime configuration, background workers, scheduled jobs and static assets. Avoid a design in which only the primary site contains the current build.

Data

Choose replication or backup based on the RPO. Synchronous replication can reduce acknowledged-write loss but may increase latency and couple locations. Asynchronous replication usually improves distance and performance, but recent writes may not have reached the recovery location when the source fails. State explicitly whether those writes are retried, reconciled or accepted as lost.

Back up databases, object storage, configuration stores and queues. Keep at least one copy outside the failure domain, protect it from accidental deletion, and encrypt it with keys that are recoverable independently. Test restoration into an empty environment; a successful backup job is not proof that a usable database can be restored.

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Identity, secrets and keys

Replicate the minimum credentials, certificates, signing keys and secret values required to run the recovery site. Store emergency access procedures offline or in an independently available system. Check expiration dates and permissions as part of every recovery rehearsal. Do not make the only administrator account, key-management service or identity directory a dependency of the failed provider.

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Observability and operations

Send health metrics, logs and alerts to a monitoring path that remains available when the primary provider is not. Define who can declare a provider outage, who approves a failover, how customer support is notified and how normal service is restored. A recovery design without an operator who can execute it is only a diagram.

Route users to the surviving environment

Traffic needs a preconfigured steering mechanism. Common choices are a global load-balancing service or DNS health checks with routing policies. AWS’s multicloud “lifeboat” pattern uses preconfigured Route 53 health checks to redirect traffic to a secondary cloud; Google Cloud guidance describes DNS health checking and weighted records for clusters on different providers.

Health checks must represent real service

Probe more than whether a port is open. Use an endpoint that verifies the application can reach its required data store and return a valid response, while avoiding a check that mutates customer data. Set independent checks from more than one network location, define failure thresholds and prevent a flapping endpoint from switching traffic repeatedly.

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DNS is not instantaneous

DNS failover is limited by resolver and browser caching, record TTLs, health-check intervals and the behavior of the chosen routing service. Do not promise a universal switch time. Document the actual TTL and detection settings, and tell operators how to verify which endpoint users are receiving. Lowering a TTL just before an incident may not affect resolvers that already cached the old record.

Prevent split-brain writes

When both locations can accept writes, a partition can create conflicting records. Decide whether the secondary is read-only until promotion, whether a single writer is elected, or how conflicts are merged. The failover procedure must fence or disable the old writer when possible before enabling writes elsewhere.

Design the failover runbook

The runbook should be executable by an on-call engineer who did not design the system. Keep it in an independently available repository and print or export an emergency copy.

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  1. Detect and qualify: confirm the incident is broader than an application bug or a single unhealthy instance. Check provider status, independent probes, application metrics and customer reports.
  2. Declare the event: record the incident time, affected services, decision maker, target RTO/RPO and communication channel.
  3. Freeze risky changes: pause deployments, migrations and jobs that could write inconsistent data. Preserve logs and the last known replication position.
  4. Check recovery readiness: verify the secondary environment, artifact versions, secrets, certificates, capacity, database state and access paths.
  5. Recover data: promote the replica or restore the selected backup. Record the recovery point and any writes that may be missing. Run schema and integrity checks before accepting traffic.
  6. Start application services: bring up web servers, APIs, workers, queues, static assets and scheduled tasks in the documented order. Confirm that dependencies resolve to the recovery location.
  7. Switch traffic: activate the load-balancer policy or DNS record, then verify propagation from independent networks. Keep the old route available for controlled rollback, but prevent it from accepting conflicting writes.
  8. Validate user journeys: test anonymous pages, authentication, read operations, writes, payments or bookings where applicable, background processing and administrative access.
  9. Communicate status: publish what is working, what data window may be affected and when the next update will occur. Avoid claiming full recovery until monitoring confirms it.
  10. Stabilize and restore: replace temporary capacity, reconcile queued work, re-establish replication and schedule a controlled return only after the original provider is demonstrably healthy.
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Keep the recovery environment from drifting

Standby systems fail because they are old, under-sized or missing an undocumented dependency. Use infrastructure-as-code or another repeatable deployment method, and continuously compare primary and recovery configurations.

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  • Deploy the same application build, database schema and security patches to both locations.
  • Verify that image registries, package mirrors and source repositories are reachable independently.
  • Measure standby capacity against peak demand, not average demand.
  • Exercise certificate renewal, secret rotation and key recovery outside the primary provider.
  • Keep contact lists, escalation paths and vendor support details current.

Test the whole path, not just backups

Google Cloud disaster-recovery guidance emphasizes planning for failure. A recovery test should include routing, data recovery, access and operational decisions, not merely a backup checksum.

Useful test levels

  • Restore test: restore a backup into an empty account or project and run integrity checks.
  • Component failover: fail a zone or database replica while measuring customer-visible behavior.
  • Regional exercise: stop using the primary region and execute the runbook with production-like data and traffic controls.
  • Provider independence exercise: validate that the secondary provider can receive traffic, obtain artifacts and secrets, and operate without primary-provider identity or monitoring.
  • Return exercise: practice re-establishing replication and moving traffic back without overwriting newer data.

Record measured detection time, decision time, routing propagation, restore duration, data gap, error rate and operator actions. Fix every deviation from the RTO or RPO, then repeat after significant architecture or provider changes.

Account for cost and complexity

Resilience costs more than duplicate virtual machines. Budget for idle or duplicated compute, replicated storage, cross-region or inter-cloud transfer, database licensing, monitoring, backup retention, security reviews, testing and staff time. Active/active systems also incur the engineering cost of conflict resolution, global routing and coordinated releases.

Use a decision matrix that scores each design on:

  • RTO and RPO achieved in a measured test;
  • readiness of secondary capacity and deployment artifacts;
  • traffic-switch behavior and cache effects;
  • data consistency and recovery-point visibility;
  • ongoing and incident-time cost;
  • operational complexity and required skills;
  • dependencies that remain in the primary failure domain.

For multicloud designs, include inter-cloud transfer charges and the engineering needed to make databases, identity, networking, observability and deployment tooling work in both environments. A simpler multi-region design may be the better answer when the business impact does not justify provider-level independence.

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Common failure modes and fixes

“We use multiple zones, so we are outage-proof.”

Why it fails: a regional control-plane, network or managed-service incident can affect every zone. Fix: add a tested second-region recovery path when regional loss exceeds your RTO.

“We have DNS failover, so switching is instant.”

Why it fails: health detection, TTLs and resolver caches delay or unevenly distribute changes. Fix: measure propagation, set realistic expectations and verify traffic from independent networks.

“The replica has all our data.”

Why it fails: asynchronous replication may lag, and acknowledged writes can be absent after source failure. Fix: monitor replication position, state the accepted data gap and define reconciliation for missing writes.

“The standby is configured, so it is ready.”

Why it fails: expired certificates, missing secrets, stale images, insufficient capacity or unavailable identity services block startup. Fix: run scheduled end-to-end promotions and track readiness as an operational metric.

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“Backups are enough.”

Why it fails: restore time may exceed the RTO, and an untested backup may be incomplete or unusable. Fix: restore into an isolated environment, time the process and retain deployable artifacts with the data.

“Both sites can write safely.”

Why it fails: network partitions create split-brain writes and conflicts. Fix: choose a single-writer or conflict-resolution model and fence the old writer during promotion.

A practical implementation checklist

  • Document customer-impact-based RTO and RPO.
  • Map every dependency to its failure domain: zone, region, provider or external service.
  • Choose backup/restore, standby or active/active for each critical component.
  • Store backups, artifacts, secrets and monitoring access outside the primary failure scope.
  • Automate infrastructure and configuration so the recovery environment is reproducible.
  • Configure health checks and routing before an incident, with documented TTL and detection behavior.
  • Monitor replication lag and expose the current recoverable point to operators.
  • Define write fencing, promotion and rollback procedures.
  • Test restore, failover, user journeys, communications and return-to-primary.
  • Measure results against the objectives and revise the design when tests miss them.

How to choose the right level of protection

If a short outage is acceptable and the site is mostly static, independently stored backups plus a documented restore may meet the business need. If minutes matter but a provider-wide event is unlikely to justify duplicated production, use multi-zone and a cross-region standby. If contractual, safety or revenue consequences demand continuity through a provider-wide disruption, operate a genuinely independent secondary provider with preconfigured routing and data recovery. In every case, the decisive evidence is a measured failover that meets the stated RTO and RPO, not the number of regions or zones shown on an architecture diagram.

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