Outages don't care how many zones you have.

Power failures, software updates, and backbone disruptions all have one thing in common: they do not respect architecture diagrams. Redundancy only works if it is designed at the correct layer. Every team believes they are covered, and yet, when something breaks, the failure reveals that what looked like protection was only an illusion.

In this week's blog, we're going on a journey into what it takes to keep products online when everyone else is scrambling to recover.

TL:DR

• Zones, regions, and clouds each solve different problems. Know which level of failure your design actually protects against.
• Redundancy and resilience are not the same. Adding more layers does not guarantee uptime unless they are truly independent.
• Cycle automates orchestration across these layers. It removes the operational burden of managing redundancy across regions or providers.

The Layers of Redundancy

A single zone is like owning one house. It is convenient, easy to maintain, and efficient to build. It provides everything you need—until something unexpected happens. When a local failure occurs, there is no alternative.

Multiple zones in one region are like owning several homes in the same neighborhood. This adds a layer of safety. If one home has an issue, you can still live in another nearby. But those homes share the same environment. If a severe storm or power outage affects the entire area, every property is at risk together.

Multi-region setups are a different approach. Think of them as owning homes in different cities. Each location has its own power grid, infrastructure, and climate. A disruption in one city might be inconvenient, but it rarely impacts the others. The separation provides genuine independence between environments.

Multi-cloud takes that logic further. Instead of staying within one provider's ecosystem, you connect different clouds together. Each has distinct operational models, hardware, and control systems. The boundaries are stronger, the isolation more complete. It is not simply redundancy within a brand, but redundancy between entire platforms. The complexity increases sharply, but so does resilience.

Finally, some organizations pursue hybrid strategies. In those cases, they combine on-premises or co-located infrastructure with cloud deployments. This approach offers ultimate flexibility, allowing teams to balance cost, performance, and control across multiple environments.

Each of these strategies represents a different point on the same curve: trading complexity for independence. The deeper you go, the more control you gain over your own availability story.

Redundancy, Resilience, Safety, and Complexity

It is easy to assume that redundancy automatically produces reliability. In practice, the relationship is more complicated. Many outages that make headlines happen inside architectures that were already built with redundancy in mind.

The issue often comes down to hidden dependencies. Two availability zones might share the same software update pipeline. A regional failure could cascade through a shared control plane. Even separate providers sometimes rely on overlapping networks or DNS infrastructure. These shared components become invisible points of failure. When teams assume redundancy will catch every problem, they design less defensively. They may delay cross-region replication or centralize monitoring under one account. In doing so, they create single points of coordination that can become single points of failure.

The key distinction is between redundancy and resilience. Redundancy is about adding components. Resilience is about ensuring that failures are contained. True reliability comes from the independence of systems, not simply the multiplication of them.

The thing to consider here is, every additional layer of protection introduces new operational burdens. A single-zone environment is easy to reason about. A multi-zone deployment doubles the number of moving parts. Multi-region and multi-cloud setups multiply that complexity many times over.

With each new level of redundancy, the surface area for errors increases. Monitoring, updates, and synchronization all become more complicated. Managing failovers requires consistent configuration, compatible networking, and awareness of version drift. Even small inconsistencies can create unpredictable behavior during a recovery event.

The real challenge is not just maintaining uptime, but maintaining understanding. When infrastructure becomes too complex for any one engineer to reason about, reliability becomes a function of process rather than knowledge. This is where automation becomes essential.

Simplifying with Cycle

One of the fundamental ideas behind Cycle is that compute can be anywhere:

• On a hyperscalar like AWS or GCP
• At a bare metal cloud managed datacenter like Vultr , PNAP , or Serverside
• In a co-location rack
• Or even in the "server room", on-prem in your organization's commercial office.

The platform doesn't really care about where it is, and everything is standardized in a way that can be reasoned about in a straightforward way. This opens the door for organizations to really start being aggressive with resilience and redundancy strategies because it completely bypasses some of the most difficult initial barriers to going multi-region or multi-cloud: the network itself and the infrastructure management across clouds.

On top of that, Cycle's architecture is provider-agnostic. We were always provider agnostic in the sense that users can deploy infrastructure from multiple providers and have it all work seamlessly without any additional networking lift. Recently, however, we've rolled out a feature called virtual providers , which have unlocked the doors to bringing almost any compute infrastructure into your Cycle clusters. This unlocks the doors for truly private clouds and hybrid clouds with an extremely low barrier to entry on implementation and management.

Reliability becomes a design property of the system, not an operational afterthought. That is what separates reactive redundancy from deliberate resilience.

Choosing the Right Level of Redundancy

If you're reading this with a team of 10 engineers, thinking how can I ever do this… You really can't - or at least you shouldn't. A stretch goal of going multi-region is great, and we can definitely help you get there (I've personally helped several single-digit eng teams go multi-region), but there are other, more important things to deal with as well.

Like with every decision, the right approach depends on what you are protecting, how much downtime you can tolerate, and what resources you have available.

Choosing correctly means aligning protection with purpose. Redundancy that exceeds your risk tolerance wastes effort, while too little redundancy leaves the business exposed. The best strategy is the one that delivers predictable continuity without unmanageable complexity.

Building Confidence Through Design

Reliability is not something that emerges by accident. It is designed, tested, and maintained. The purpose of redundancy is not to remove the possibility of failure, but to ensure that failure does not dictate the outcome.

Cycle exists to make that kind of confidence accessible. Automating orchestration and enforcing consistency across environments allows teams to focus on what matters most: delivering reliable experiences to their users.

The next time an outage rolls across a provider, your systems should not depend on luck. They should depend on design.

That is what it means to build infrastructure that endures.