finops

The vocabulary of "multi-X" gets thrown around loosely in cloud architecture conversations, and four different things end up conflated into one. Multi-AZ, multi-account, multi-region, multi-cloud — they sound related but they aren't really. They have different costs, different benefits, and different prerequisites. They deserve to be evaluated separately. Multi-AZ: the resilience pattern you mostly get for free It's worth naming what the cloud gives you almost by default — and what corporate on-prem data centers historically didn't. A modern cloud region is a cluster of independent availability zones, typically three or more, each its own physical data center with its own power, network, and cooling. The major managed services — databases, load balancers, queues, object stores, even Kubernetes control planes — are designed to run across AZs. Active-active-active across three AZs is the cloud-native default, not an architectural achievement. ...

The vocabulary of "multi-X" gets thrown around loosely in cloud architecture conversations, and four different things end up conflated into one. Multi-AZ, multi-account, multi-region, multi-cloud — they sound related but they aren't really. They have different costs, different benefits, and different prerequisites. They deserve to be evaluated separately. Multi-AZ: the resilience pattern you mostly get for free Before getting to anything else, it's worth naming what the cloud gives you almost by default — and what corporate on-prem data centers historically didn't. A modern cloud region is a cluster of independent availability zones, typically three or more, each its own physical data center with its own power, network, and cooling. The major managed services — databases, load balancers, queues, object stores, even Kubernetes control planes — are designed to run across AZs. Active-active-active across three AZs is the cloud-native default, not an architectural achievement. ...