Every so often, there’s an AWS outage that ripples across the internet — and every time it happens, I get the same panicked call:
“Can you just move us to another region real quick?”
I wish it were that easy.
The truth is, you can’t refactor your way out of an outage while it’s happening. Planning for failure isn’t just part of being in the cloud. It’s part of running a business in the digital world, whether your servers run on the cloud, a private datacenter, or in your own server closet.
That means asking the uncomfortable “What if?” questions before something breaks.
Two of the most important acronyms in this world are RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO tells you how much data loss is acceptable. RTO tells you how long your systems can be down before it starts to hurt.
Here’s the thing: shorter times = higher costs. Faster recovery almost always means higher complexity and spend. But when you’re losing $50,000 an hour in downtime, the math becomes pretty clear.
Changing architecture and applications in the middle of an outage isn’t realistic — but planning for one is. Every tech leader should be asking:
What happens if our primary region goes dark?
Can we failover without downtime?
Are we alerting on the right metrics — or just flooding our team with noise?
At Mission, I lead the Cloud Operations team. We’ve been fine-tuning how we handle this exact problem. During the last major AWS outage, our monitoring stack lit up like a Christmas tree. Without automation, those thousands of alerts could’ve buried us.
Instead, our AI Ops tooling helped us correlate the noise, reducing actionable alerts by around 40% — and freeing our engineers to focus on what actually mattered.
Moral of the story: Outages are inevitable. Chaos isn’t.
