Public Cloud Costs Versus Resiliency: Stateless Applications

To reduce the impact of more frequent and widespread cloud outages, users must architect cloud-native applications that are resilient to the failure of providers’ virtual machines, availability zones and regions. In the event of a service interruption, outage compensation from cloud providers is highly unlikely to cover the cloud costs relative to the application, let alone the business losses.

This report quantifies the costs of several common architectures for building resiliency for a stateless cloud application and determines the level of protection and compensation for each application.

Key Findings: 

• A simple application distributed across zones costs 45% more than an unprotected application.
• Distributing workloads across multiple zones provide higher resiliency than across a single zone, with no extra cost.
• Users pay more than double the cost of an unprotected application for one that is protected against regional failures.
• Failures in zones are more common than in regions. However, a backup regional failover can be configured at a low-cost premium of just five percentage points more than zone-level protection.

Report Authors:

• Dr. Owen Rogers, Research Director for Cloud Computing at Uptime Institute