Hasty Briefsbeta

How to keep your apps up when AWS is down

21 hours ago
  • #geo-replication
  • #high-availability
  • #AWS
  • Applications need to be available 24/7 globally, but AWS outages (e.g., us-east-1 in December 2021) caused major disruptions for companies like ChatGPT, Snapchat, Netflix, Disney+, and Robinhood.
  • The root cause often lies in the lack of true geo-replication, which is critical for modern applications handling financial transactions, healthcare, and supply chains.
  • Traditional geo-replication challenges include distributed state management complexity, complex replication logic, operational overhead, and application-level changes.
  • Restate simplifies geo-replication by handling distributed systems complexity, allowing developers to focus on business logic without special code.
  • Deploying a geo-replicated Restate application involves configuring location-aware nodes, setting cross-region replication policies, and enabling S3 cross-region replication.
  • During a region failure, Restate automatically detects the failure, redistributes leadership, maintains consistency, and ensures zero downtime with minimal latency spikes.
  • Restate allows starting with a single-region deployment and scaling to a geo-replicated setup without changing application code.