The temptation is to look for someone to blame. But the real question is another: what have we put in place so that if one piece falls, the whole castle doesn’t collapse? Too often, the answer is “we’ll deal with it later.” And “we’ll deal with it later” doesn’t pay salaries or save reputations.
I take inventory of the dependencies: DNS that doesn’t resolve, identities that don’t authenticate, queues stuck, automations waiting. An orchestra without a conductor. I realize that reliability can’t be bought — it must be designed.
At 9:30, I feel the weight of postponed decisions: “one region is enough,” “we’ll replicate tomorrow.” Meanwhile, customer care turns to apologies, sales bounces between blank screens, production waits for signals. Every minute feels like an hour.
In the middle of the chaos comes a moment of clarity: resilience isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a core attribute of the business model. It means accepting that failure will happen and deciding it won’t break us: distributing vital organs, understanding invisible dependencies, testing failovers when everything is working fine. DNS, identity, automation, and observability are first-league priorities. And we train for it: “game days” where we simulate outages to see if the company can still breathe.
In the afternoon, services return in waves. The difference isn’t the length of the outage, but how we got there: those who designed redundancy stumble but recover; those who mistook the provider’s reliability for their own remain stuck. We have to choose: luck and patches, or redundancy and discipline as a competitive advantage.
In the evening, I decide on the turning point: no single point of failure for anything that pays the bills. Where today there’s a single zone, tomorrow there’ll be multi-AZ or multi-region. Identities with continuity paths. DNS with backup plans. Pipelines that aren’t bottlenecks. Observability that tells the full story, in real time. And crisis drills on the calendar: failing in rehearsal to succeed in the field.
The human side is even clearer: customer trust is worth more than any theoretical uptime. What’s needed is a design that embraces processes, people, and technology. Here, a partner capable of managing the modern workplace makes all the difference: identity at the core, governed devices, consistent policies, and a continuity plan that holds even when the power goes out.
The next day we start again — but differently. The cloud is powerful, not magical. The promise I make is this: not the illusion of “never down,” but the certainty of an organization designed to keep going. It costs more than luck — but far less than a company standing still for a single morning.
