Yeah, just double++ the cost to have a clone of all your systems. Worth it if you need to guarantee uptime. Although, it also doubles your exposure to potential data breaches as well.

> double++

I'd suggest to ++double the cost. Compare:

++double: spoken as "triple" -> team says that double++ was a joke, we can obviously only double the cost -> embarrassingly you quickly agree -> team laughs -> team approves doubling -> you double the cost -> team goes out for beers -> everyone is happy

double++: spoken as "double" -> team quickly agrees and signs off -> you consequently triple the cost per c precedence rules -> manager goes ballistic -> you blithely recount the history of c precedence in a long monotone style -> job returns EINVAL -> beers = 0

Lol :)

And likely far more than double the cost since you have to use the criminally-priced outbound bandwidth to keep everything in sync.

Shouldn't be double in the long term. Think of the second cloud as a cold standby. Depends on the system. Periodic replication of data layer (object storage/database) and CICD configured to be able to build services and VMs on multiple clouds. Have automatic tests weekly/monthly that represent end-to-end functionality, have scaled tests semi-annually.

This is all very, very hand-wavey. And if one says "golly gee, all our config is too cloud specific to do multi-cloud" then you've figured out why cloud blows and that there is no inherent reason not to have API standards for certain mature cloud services like serverless functions, VMs and networks.

Edit to add- ink ow how grossly simplified this is, and that most places have massively complex systems.

And data egress fees just to get the clone set up, right? This doesn’t seem feasible as a macrostrategy. Maybe for a small number of critical services.

How do you handle replication lag for databases?

If you use something like cockroachdb you can have a multi-master cluster and use regional-by-row tables to locate data close to users. It'll fail over fine to other regions if needed.