Resilience by Design: Lessons in Multi-Cloud Readiness

Two major hyperscaler outages in a month, and several more earlier this year, have made one thing clear: Modern infrastructure is showing its fragility. Modern clouds are sturdy, flexible, and able to meet customer requirements at a global scale. They're excellent tools and trusted platforms. But they still have incidents, and as our lives have become increasingly reliant on online experiences, these incidents are becoming severe. Services stall, businesses halt, and users lose trust (and patience).

These organizations are powered by brilliant, passionate people dedicated to serving their customers well. However, these events highlight a new reality: as the internet becomes more centralized, its interdependence also creates systemic risk. The world needs a more resilient way forward.

At Fastly, we’re committed to building a faster, more resilient internet, one that’s ready for whatever comes next. Here’s how we make that future a reality.

Multi-cloud is hard. We make it easier

We have global load-balancing functionality that dynamically routes traffic based on origin health – if one cloud is degraded, we can route traffic to another. We also offer redundant, standards-compliant Object Storage. Beyond redundancy, we intelligently protect your origins against the largest DDoS attacks and most complex security vulnerabilities. Our tools are designed to empower you to weather any origin issue or minimize impacts as much as possible.

But, like most system changes, the hardest part of being multi-cloud isn’t always the technology but often the planning and architecture strategy. That’s where our teams work alongside our customers. Not only do our products support a multi-cloud strategy, but our experts have also helped some of the world’s most significant sites migrate data centers, refactor their architecture, and become resilient and bulletproof against widespread origin impact. We’ve shared how we approach some of our internal resilience planning in talks and blogs for the benefit of others, and we can work with you directly to strengthen your business and technology systems to withstand future outages.

We’ve helped our customers stay fast and reliable during massive global events, from nearly every major sporting championship to Black Friday – events that pressure test even the best systems. The same engineering discipline that keeps those moments online can help you build resilience for everyday operations, too.

Beyond hyperscalers, many of our customers have implemented a multi-CDN architecture alongside a multi-cloud strategy, and we fully support them. Rather than discouraging the practice, we welcome the collaboration. We’ve found that we perform well in head-to-head situations where results matter. More importantly, it's the right strategy for our customers’ success.

Building resilience beyond the origin

We’ve designed our edge platform to help customers stay online even when upstream providers experience issues. Our globally distributed edge architecture gives customer teams more control over how, where, and when content is delivered, a key factor in staying reliable when parts of the internet face disruption.

Here’s how that helps during large-scale outages:

• Localized routing: Fastly’s anycast network automatically routes around unhealthy regions to maintain performance and uptime. And our globally distributed POPs bring content closer to the user, reducing latency and improving reliability even when parts of the network are under stress.

• Independent control and data planes: Our traffic keeps flowing even if management systems experience slowdowns or connectivity issues.

• Programmable responses: Teams can use Fastly edge logic to dynamically adjust traffic behavior, switch origins, or serve cached responses when upstream dependencies are degraded.

• Real-time visibility: Detailed logging and metrics help customers detect anomalies early and respond before users are impacted.

We also rely on automation to keep the network healthy at scale. Autopilot and Precision Path continuously monitor and optimize traffic in real time. Together, they make the Fastly network self-tuning, able to react faster and more precisely than manual intervention.  

In short, we help customers build resilience at the edge – a critical complement to redundancy in the core.

Building for Continuous Uptime: How Resilient Architecture Keeps You Online

Our industry offers countless cloud services that work well enough. However, these recent outages demonstrate that working reasonably well most of the time can often result in unexpected failures at the worst moments. No single provider can prevent every outage. But how your architecture responds to one determines your users’ experience. A multi-layered strategy, combining resilient DNS, cloud services, and an intelligent edge layer, provides the best protection against the unexpected.

If you're managing a system that must stay online, where stability is mission-critical, you can’t afford to use generic approaches that work “most of the time.” We are here to support you as a partner working toward exceptional resiliency, performance, stability, and security.

While perfect uptime is impossible, we help you achieve exceptional uptime through our products, people, and partnerships. We work with the largest enterprises, the most ambitious startups, and the most vital open source ecosystems to keep the internet running smoothly. 

If you want that same level of diligence and rigor for your systems, give us a shout. If you want to get these benefits instantly, sign up for a Fastly account.