[mikesabbagh]

As an SRE, we accept that different regions will fail every now and then. So how to mitigate them is the big question.

I think having a database replicated to 2 regions and load balance all traffic to both region has a big impact on performance and read after write consistency The solution is what the last option suggests; the second region is prepared as a fallback solution only and not as a live solution. This way, you accept that you will still have some downtime and maybe some data loss too whenever a failover takes places. But this is much better than going down for hours, and is much better than having 2 regions in Active-Active mode where your system will suffer from performance and data consistency So accept you will have failures, work on the better solution. The perfect solution does not exist. There is no 100%