Introduction
Many modern web applications have external cloud services that they depend on to function. Using monolithic web servers to handle all an application's services and features has given way to a service-oriented approach, which distributes an application's needs to dedicated micro-services. Often, whole sections of micro-services can be replaced with external cloud services via API integrations. This shift trades control and flexibility of a given service for scalability and availability.
Popular cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, guarantee 99.95% uptime of their services across all their geographic zones. That's a mere 4 hours, 22 minutes, and 48 seconds of downtime in an entire year, which is considerably mitigated if you diversify your application across more than one geographical zone. Having a 99.9% or better uptime is very common for most popular cloud services, and when you compare that with the cost and risk of maintaining your own custom solution, it's clear...