[0xbadcafebee]

> I thought the "cloud" was supposed to make this kind of failure impossible

You have to remember that you're trying to have access to backend platforms and infrastructure at all times, which almost no public utility does (assuming "the cloud" is "public utility computing"). Power plants go into partial shutdown, water treatment plants stop processing, etc. Utilities are only designed to provide constant reliability for the last mile.

If there's a problem with your power company, they can redirect power from another part of the grid to service customers. But some part of your power company is just... down. Luckily you have no need to operate on all parts of the grid at all times, so you don't notice it's down. But failure will still happen.

Your main concern should be the reliability of the last mile. Getting away from managing infrastructure yourself is the first step in that equation. AppEngine and FaaS should be the only computing resources you use, and only object storage and databases for managing data. This will get you closer to public utility-like computing.

But there's no way to get truly reliable computing today. We would all need to use edge computing, and that means leaning heavily on ISPs and content provider networks. Every cloud computing provider is looking into this right now, but considering who actually owns the last mile, I don't think we're going to see edge computing "take over" for at least a decade.