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Provider Redundancy

Multi-cloud redundancy distributes services across multiple cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure to reduce dependency on any single vendor's backbone. This approach protects against provider-wide outages that internal regional failover alone cannot prevent.

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About this video

Regional redundancy within a single cloud provider offers meaningful protection against localized failures, but it does not eliminate the risk of a broader provider-level outage. Because many cloud services share common underlying infrastructure — such as AWS's heavy reliance on S3 resources hosted in specific regions — a disruption in one area can cascade and affect workloads elsewhere within the same provider's network, even when those workloads are technically hosted in a different region. Multi-cloud redundancy solves this by spreading services across fundamentally separate providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, so that no single vendor's infrastructure represents a single point of failure. Organizations can extend this model further by incorporating colocation facilities, where they operate their own equipment in a third-party data center, or by maintaining on-premises infrastructure as a last-resort failover target. Each layer adds an independent fallback that operates outside any one provider's control. A practical implementation might designate a colocation facility as the primary environment, with a public cloud provider as the first failover target and on-premises infrastructure as a final fallback. This architecture gives organizations flexibility to balance cost, control, and availability — maintaining full ownership over physical hardware where needed while still benefiting from the scalability of cloud services. The result is a resilient, layered redundancy strategy capable of withstanding provider-wide incidents that purely single-cloud designs cannot address.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Multi-Provider Cloud Redundancy

Key terms

Redundancy
The duplication of critical components or systems to increase reliability and availability.
Failover
The automatic switching to a redundant system or component when the primary one fails.
Cloud Computing
The delivery of computing services including servers, storage, and software over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS
A cloud service model that provides virtualized computing infrastructure over the internet.
Colocation
A data center model in which an organization rents physical space, power, cooling, and network connectivity from a third-party facility while retaining ownership of its own servers and equipment.
On-Premises
An infrastructure deployment model in which hardware and software are hosted locally within an organization's own facilities rather than in a cloud provider's data center. On-premises deployments give organizations full control over their security posture.
Cloud Provider Redundancy
A strategy that distributes services across multiple cloud providers to prevent a single provider's outage from causing a complete service disruption.

Topics

Cloud Computing Multi Cloud Provider Redundancy Failover Colocation Infrastructure As A Service Disaster Recovery

Transcript

When you're talking about the major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, you can really have all of the redundancy in the world. That is, we can geographically spread things out. We can have different servers running things with different services like RDS running. There's a lot of different ways we can create redundancy within the system, and it really helps us set these up. But the problem is it still resides on the backbone of Amazon Web Services, and if there's something wrong with that, it can cause other problems as well. So one consideration is that we actually split our services amongst different providers, so we can have some sort of provider redundancy.

An outage inside one provider

One of the SaaS companies that I worked for had millions of users, and they were relying on those services to be up and running. What we had in Amazon Web Services is our services in the Oregon region, but just as a backup, we had a lot of the services being able to fail over to the Virginia region. There was a problem in the Virginia region. Our main servers weren't over there, but a lot of AWS services reside on S3 and specifically from Virginia. So when the Virginia site had an issue, about a 6-hour outage/issue, then some of our services went a little wonky. Thankfully it didn't cause big problems to our customers, but it potentially really could have. There were these issues because it was all part of the same provider.

Distributing across providers

So perhaps there are times that we want to guard against this by distributing our services amongst multiple providers. Here are some of the major players in the space: an Amazon Web Services, a Microsoft Azure, and a Google Cloud. What we could do is distribute amongst these, or even our own location, or maybe a colocation, or one of these providers here. Just a reminder what the on-premise or location would be: the colocation, which would be another entity, not like Amazon Web Services, where we go and set up our own equipment there, or infrastructure as a service, so this would be like the AWSs and the Microsoft Azures.

Maybe perhaps I want to distribute amongst multiple and have some colocation where I have full control over it, but in case something goes wrong I can fail over to a cloud provider. So what might that look like? Maybe I have some sort of colocation that I rent and I have my equipment there, and then I could fail over to a site one, which would be a cloud provider one. Maybe this is Google Cloud. Or maybe I also have some on-premise equipment, so as a last-case scenario I could always fail over to this on-premise, this stuff that I control internally, and so I have a lot of control over it. This is just one example where I could have multiple sites here and have it located at different providers.

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