When "Always-On" goes dark ⚡ Remember when cloud computing promised us a world where systems would never fail? Triple redundancy. Self-healing infrastructure. Geographic distribution. The cloud was supposed to be our digital fortress - immune to the single points of failure that plagued traditional IT. Yet here we are in late October 2025, watching major cloud providers stumble over what amounts to basic configuration errors: Azure's massive outage took down Microsoft 365, Xbox, Minecraft, and countless enterprise services. The culprit? An "inadvertent configuration change" to Azure Front Door. Not a sophisticated cyberattack. Not a natural disaster. A configuration mistake. AWS: Just last week, a DNS issue in their US-East-1 region brought down Roblox, Fortnite, Coinbase, and dozens of other services for hours. The irony? The very infrastructure designed to eliminate downtime became the single point of failure‼️ 💰 But the outages aren't even the biggest surprise. Remember when cloud was going to save us money? Yet in 2023 49% of companies spent MORE on cloud than expected (IDC Cloud Pulse) and 59% anticipated similar overruns in 2024. I remember in one of my previous company we could cut cloud costs within a year by over 60% without any impact to service quality, showing the enormous bloat you get from the cloud, when not applying proper engineering discipline. The promise of "pay only for what you use" has morphed into a complex game of hidden fees, data egress charges, and unexpected scaling costs. Within AI workloads even getting worse. 🤑 🧠 Given the mounting evidence perhaps it's time to revisit the often-dismissed hybrid cloud strategy. Yes, hybrid was "uncool." It wasn't as sleek as going all-in on cloud. It required more planning, more complexity, more thinking. But consider this: 90% of enterprises are projected to adopt hybrid infrastructure strategies by 2027 (Gartner). They're doing it for good reasons: ✓ Resilience: Keep critical workloads on-premises when cloud providers stumble ✓ Cost Control: Run steady-state workloads where it's most economical ✓ Compliance: Maintain sensitive data under direct control ✓ Performance: Reduce latency for mission-critical applications ✓ Flexibility: Scale up in the public cloud only when needed The cloud hasn't failed - our assumptions about it have. Cloud computing remains transformative. But it's not a silver bullet. It's a tool, and like any tool, it works best when applied strategically rather than universally. In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain fragility, and increasing regulatory complexity, betting everything on someone else's infrastructure might not be the wisest move. Maybe hybrid wasn't the compromise we settled for. Maybe it was the strategy we needed all along. #CloudComputing #HybridCloud #CloudStrategy #ITInfrastructure #DigitalTransformation #CloudCosts #EnterpriseIT
It perfectly highlights that evaluating a hybrid cloud approach is a top priority for anyone with (even the slightest) critical infrastructure running in the public cloud today. Great summary, Stefan!
This hit hard🤔🤔🤔 The very infrastructure designed to eliminate downtime became the single point of failure.
Martin Wolle
1w
Absolutely, this hits the nail on the head. ⚡ Cloud hype sold us “always-on” as a guarantee, but outages like Azure Front Door and AWS DNS remind us that no system is infallible.
This conversation around the illusion of “always-on” cloud infrastructure could not be more timely. The recent Azure Front Door outage and a series of management portal failures across multiple continents really underline how, despite decades of progress, configuration errors and operational oversights remain the leading causes of cloud downtime , ahead of even large-scale cyberattacks or natural disasters. It’s telling that hyperscalers, despite architectural redundancy and global reach, are still subject to single points of failure at the orchestration layer. The tide towards hybrid and even multicloud adoption is not just about flexibility or control, but a realistic acknowledgment of operational risk and the need for true resilience. According to recent Gartner forecasts, hybrid strategies are now becoming standard, driven by the demand to keep critical workloads shielded from cloud vendor outages and to comply with ever-tightening regulatory requirements around data sovereignty and operational continuity. On costs, the spiraling overruns are a persistent signal that without robust governance disciplines , from active FinOps to systematic configuration reviews , cloud does not automatically deliver on its cost-savings promise. Especially with AI workloads pushing network and compute demand, the unpredictability of egress fees and scaling costs require a far more proactive approach. Ultimately, recent incidents show that the criticality and complexity of cloud infrastructure force organizations to rethink where and how they place their trust. Hybrid is evolving from an uncool compromise to an essential strategy. Today, resilience is as much about architectural design and automation as about governance and the ability to quickly regain control when the unexpected happens. The cloud’s full transformative power depends on this level of maturity and realism.
Passionate about harnessing the power of Data by turning Possibility into Reality. | Cloudera - Senior Solutions Engineer | Ex-Travelers | Ex-Bank of America | Ex-Yankee Candle | Open for Board/Advisor Roles
1wThis hits home. The promise of “always-on” has turned into “always-paying.” At Cloudera, we’re seeing customers rediscover the power of hybrid—keeping control of their most critical data while still taking advantage of cloud scale when it makes sense. Hybrid isn’t the fallback; it’s the freedom strategy. #Cloudera