We've all been told to run our apps across three different data centers. Spread it out. Make it redundant. High availability. That's what good engineers do, right?
Here's the problem: We're following 2010 advice in 2025. The cloud got better. The failure patterns changed. But we're still building like it's 15 years ago.
And it's costing us millions while killing our teams.
Two Ways This Hurts Us Every Day
Deployments Take Forever
Running in one data center:
Running in three data centers:
We just added 25 minutes to every single deploy. Push code 6 times a day? That's 2.5 hours wasted. Every day.
Our competition is shipping features while we're waiting for health checks.
Every Problem Takes 4x Longer to Fix
We've all been there. It's 2 AM and something's broken.
One data center: Look at logs (2 min) → Find the bad code (3 min) → Fix and push (18 min) → Back up in 23 minutes.
Three data centers: Look at logs (2 min) → Wait, why is only center 2 slow? (10 min) → Is it the network? (8 min) → Database sync issue? (7 min) → Cache problem? (10 min) → Oh, bad code only in center 2 (15 min) → Which centers need fixing? (5 min) → Push everywhere (25 min) → Verify they match (10 min) → Back up in 92 minutes.
We turned a 23-minute fix into a 92-minute debugging nightmare. Our on-call engineers are drowning.
What This Actually Costs
Here's what a typical software company (making $500K-2M per year) actually pays:
ANNUAL COSTS
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
Three Data Centers:
Cloud bills: $440,000
Extra engineers: $350,000 (need 2 more)
Slow deploys: $2,100,000 (ship 40% slower)
Long incidents: $180,000
Sync problems: $95,000
─────────────────────────────────────────────
TOTAL: $3,165,000
One Center + Smart Backups:
Cloud bills: $132,000
Backup system: $35,000
Extra engineers: $0
Fast deploys: Ship 2x faster
Quick fixes: Problems solved fast
─────────────────────────────────────────────
TOTAL: $167,000
WE'RE BURNING $3 MILLION PER YEAR
But here's what really hurts: We're paying smart engineers to manage complexity instead of building products. We're losing to competitors who ship faster because they're not fighting systems they created.
When This Actually Makes Sense
We need three data centers if:
We run hospital systems where people die if we go down
We process millions of dollars every hour in real-time
Regulators specifically require it (not "we think they want it")
We're at Netflix or Stripe scale with dedicated platform teams
If that's not us, we're making life harder for no reason.
What Actually Works
We've been trying to prevent rare problems with complexity. Here's what works better: Build systems that recover fast.
Here's the pattern:
Run everything in one data center (simple, fast, easy to manage)
Back up data automatically every 15 minutes
Test the backup system every quarter (actually run the recovery)
Keep the main database in two places (just the database, nothing else)
Goal: Recover in 2 hours when the rare disaster happens
What this gives us: Teams that build features instead of fighting infrastructure. Problems fixed in 30 minutes instead of 90. Deploys in 18 minutes instead of 43. And we save $3 million every year.
The Bottom Line
We can keep burning $3 million per year on complicated systems we can't operate well, making every deploy slow, and turning every incident into a 90-minute nightmare.
Or we can build systems that work, move fast, and recover quickly when rare problems actually happen.
The cloud got reliable. The old playbooks don't work anymore.
What are you going to do about it?
