The key thing that AWS provides is the capacity for infinite redundancy. Everyone that is down because us-east-1 is down didn't learn the lesson of redundancy.

Some organizations’ leadership takes one look at the cost of redundancy and backs away. Paying for redundant resources most organizations can stomach. The network traffic charges are what push many over the edge of “do not buy”.

The cost of re-designing and re-implementing applications to synchronize data shipping to remote regions and only spinning up remote region resources as needed is even larger for these organizations.

And this is how we end up with these massive cloud footprints not much different than running fleets of VM’s. Just about the most expensive way to use the cloud hyperscalers.

Most non-tech industry organizations cannot face the brutal reality that properly, really leveraging hyperscalers involves a period of time often counted in decades for Fortune-scale footprints where they’re spending 3-5 times on selected areas more than peers doing those areas in the old ways to migrate to mostly spot instance-resident, scale-to-zero elastic, containerized services with excellent developer and operational troubleshooting ergonomics.

Active-active RDBMS - which is really the only feasible way to do HA, unless you can tolerate losing consistency (or the latency hit of running a multi-region PC/EC system) - is significantly more difficult to reason about, and to manage.

Except Google Spanner, I’m told, but AWS doesn’t have an answer for that yet AFAIK.