Multi-Region Failover Strategies

When Entire Data Centers Go Dark

When Hurricane Sandy flooded a significant portion of AWS's US-East-1 data center in 2012, thousands of applications running single-region architectures went offline for hours. Netflix, however, continued streaming to millions of users without interruption. The difference? Their multi-region failover strategy treated regional failures as routine events, not catastrophes.

Today, we'll explore the sophisticated patterns that keep global applications running when entire regions disappear, and build a working system that demonstrates these principles in action.