My company deploys everything in the cloud, but we can still do some meaningful work locally for a few hours if needed in a pinch. Out gitlab is self hosted because that’s extra critical.

I continue writing code and unit tests while i wait for the cloud to work again. If the outage is a long time, I may even spin up “DynamoDB Local” via docker for some of our simpler services that only interact with DynamoDB. Our apache flink services that read from kafka are a lost cause obviously lol.

It’s also a good opportunity to tackle any minor refactoring that you’ve been hoping to do. Also possible without the cloud.

You can also work on _designing_ new features (whiteboarding, creating a design document, etc). Often when doing so you need to look at the source to see how the current implementation works. That’s much easier with code comments.