Public cloud means 100% uptime...not

One of the argument to go to the public cloud is that it is more reliable than private cloud. But more reliable does this mean that will work 100% of the time?

 Of course not.

A few examples:                   

March 2020        

•  Azure down for 6h in the US East region
• Microsoft Teams down for 2h for European customers

April 2020

• GCP downtime of 90 minutes on their IAM API; Snapchat down, and Nest security camera's could no longer record footage

September/October 2020

• Azure AD down for several hours; Teams and other Office365 services no longer worked (as they couldn't authenticate)

November 2020

• AWS down in the US East region (resulting in downtime for Adobe, Glassdoor, Autodesk, The Wall Street Journal,...)

December 2020

• GCP down for about 45 minutes; resulting in downtime on YouTube, Gmail, Google Assistant, and Google Docs

March 2021

• AWS outage caused by a type of an AWS engineer with 4h downtime; result in downtime on Netflix, Airbnb, Slack,....

If there is a hick-up on one of the major public-clouds, we will know about it. Even the mainstream news agencies will report about it. If there is a hick-up in your private cloud, you will know and others won't.

If the only reason for your move to the public cloud is getting 100% uptime, then think again. Sh*t happens, public or private.

Microsoft Azure status: https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/

AWS status: https://status.aws.amazon.com/

GCP status: https://status.cloud.google.com/summary

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