[ReidZB]

I mean, I agree in spirit, but everyone has a different sense of cost/complexity vs. return.

I don't advocate for ever-more-complicated solutions as a rule. e.g. I think multi-cloud setups are probably way more trouble than they're worth for most companies.

I certainly agree that graceful degradation where possible and not too expensive is ideal. For example, if S3 is having problems in one region, being able to fall back (gracefully degrade) into read-only mode might be a nice thing to have.

(In this particular case having a secondary region also probably helps with disaster recovery, which is pretty much mandatory in B2B, for better or worse.)

[johanneswu]

I completely agree. If building a read-only fallback would require a lot of engineering and added a lot of complexity I would also say it is overkill, but as this solution doesn’t (happy to argue about that). It was an acceptable tradeoff for us as we already replica the underlying s3 buckets for disaster recovery as you already pointed out.

We also run our underlying Content Delivery APIs in two AWS regions so this was a logical extension.

If the added complexity is worth for your use-case can only be decided by you and I hope the article provided some guidance around that vs. just being a copy & paste gist.

Source: I work at Contentful.