After the Outage: The Zoom Call That Changed Everything

#aws#cloud#startup#softwaredevelopment

TextMiner stayed up when AWS went down. A week later, founders Marcus and Sarah shared how. This Zoom call became the blueprint for resilience.

Marcus stared at his inbox Thursday morning. 127 unread messages. Most had the same desperate energy:

"How do we do what you did?"
"Can you look at our architecture?"
"We can't afford to go down again."

He walked over to Sarah's desk. "We need to do something."

Sarah looked up from her laptop. "The Zoom call?"

"The Zoom call."

By noon, they'd sent out an invitation: "AWS Resilience: Open Zoom Q&A with TextMiner's CTO and CEO."

By 2 PM, 47 people had RSVP'd.

Thursday, 6 PM Pacific — The Call Starts

Marcus adjusted his webcam. Sarah pulled up the shared screen with their architecture diagrams. The Zoom grid filled with faces—CTOs, senior engineers, solo founders, all carrying the same weight from October 20th.

"Alright," Marcus said. "No slides. No sales pitch. Just real answers to real problems. Who wants to go first?"

Question 1: "Where Do I Even Start?"

A face in the top row unmuted. "I'm Elena. Solo founder, 8 months in. My entire product runs in us-east-1. I don't even know what I don't know. Where do I start?"

Sarah leaned forward. "Elena, I'm going to give you the answer Marcus gave me 18 months ago when our AWS bill almost killed us. Start with three questions."

Marcus picked up: "One: What's your single most critical service? The one that if it goes down, customers immediately notice and you lose money."

"Image processing API," Elena said immediately. "My customers upload photos, we analyze them."

"Two," Sarah continued, "how long can that service be down before you start losing customers permanently? Not just annoyed—gone."

Elena thought. "Maybe... 4 hours? After that, they'll start looking for alternatives."

"Three," Marcus said, "what's your monthly AWS spend right now?"

"About $400."

Marcus nodded. "Okay. Here's your Monday morning checklist."

THE BOOTSTRAP TIER (Under $1K/month AWS spend):

"First, audit where everything lives. Open your AWS console, go to each service, and write down which region. If you see us-east-1 everywhere, that's your problem."

Marcus shared his screen, showing a simple spreadsheet:

• Service | Current Region | Critical? | Failover Plan

"Second, for your critical API—your image processing—do this: Deploy it to us-west-2 as well. Same code, different region. Use Route 53 health checks for automatic failover. That's maybe $50 more per month, max."

"Third, test the failover manually. Kill us-east-1 in your Route 53 settings and watch traffic switch to us-west-2. If it doesn't work, you haven't built resilience—you've just spent money."

Sarah added, "And this is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy. Before we did this, we were one outage away from bankruptcy. After? We closed a $4.8M deal because we stayed up."

Elena was typing frantically. "That's... that's actually doable."

Question 2: "Multi-Region Without Going Broke"

Joe W., a CTO from a healthcare startup, unmuted. "We're doing $12K/month on AWS. We need five-nines uptime because we're handling patient data. But I've been quoted $40K/month for 'proper' multi-region. I can't justify that to our board."

Sarah's expression sharpened. "Who quoted you that?"

"AWS Sales."

"They're not wrong, but they're selling you enterprise patterns you don't need yet." She pulled up a different screen. "Marcus, show them the TextMiner architecture."

Marcus shared a diagram. "This is what we actually run. Not what the Well-Architected Framework says we should run. What we actually run."

THE GROWING COMPANY TIER ($5K-$20K/month AWS spend):

"Primary region: us-west-2. Everything runs here normally. Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB.

"Secondary region: us-east-1. Core services only. Not everything—just the services that touch customers.

"How it works: Route 53 health checks monitor us-west-2. If it goes down, traffic automatically routes to us-east-1. DynamoDB Global Tables handle the data replication.

"The cost? We added about $2,800/month. Not $28,000. Not $40,000."

Joe leaned closer to his camera. "What didn't you replicate?"

"Internal tools. Admin dashboards. Batch processing jobs. Anything that doesn't directly impact customer experience. If us-west-2 goes down, our internal team deals with degraded tools. Our customers see nothing."

Sarah jumped in. "This is the conversation you have with your board: 'We can stay online during the next AWS outage for $2,800/month, or we can risk losing patient trust and paying HIPAA breach penalties. Which sounds better?'"

"And," Marcus added, "we tested this. AWS Fault Injection Simulator. We killed us-west-2 during business hours—intentionally. Customers didn't notice. That's the proof you take to your board."

Question 3: "Chaos Engineering Sounds Terrifying"

A familiar name in the participant list caught Marcus's eye. "Priya P., is that you?"

Priya from DataFlow—the engineer from the Medium article about their tiger team—unmuted and smiled. "Hey Marcus. Different company now, but same question everyone has: How do I run chaos tests without accidentally taking down production?"

Marcus grinned. "Perfect timing. Sarah, remember when I accidentally killed our production database during our first chaos test?"

"I remember the Slack messages," Sarah said dryly. "They were... colorful."

"Right. So here's what we learned the hard way."

CHAOS ENGINEERING FOR HUMANS:

"Start in staging. Not production. STAGING. I don't care how confident you are.

"Use AWS Fault Injection Simulator. It's built into AWS, costs like $2 for a test, and has guardrails.

"Test one thing at a time:

• Day 1: Latency. Add 500ms delay to API calls. See what breaks.
• Day 2: Regional failure. Make us-east-1 unavailable for 2 minutes. Watch your failover.
• Day 3: Database throttling. Limit DynamoDB throughput. See how your app handles it.

"Each test should last 2–5 minutes max. You're not trying to cause chaos. You're revealing where chaos already exists."

Priya nodded. "And when do you move to production testing?"

"When your staging tests pass three times in a row, and you've got your CTO or CEO watching with you. Sarah literally sat next to me when we ran our first production chaos test."

Sarah raised her coffee mug to the camera. "Someone had to be there to stop him if it went sideways. Also, I wanted to see if our architecture actually worked."

"Did it?" someone asked from the chat.

"First try? No," Sarah said. "Second try, after Marcus fixed the circuit breaker logic? Yes. That's the point. Find the failures in controlled tests, not during customer-facing outages."

Question 4: "What Do I Tell My CEO?"

David K., VP of Engineering, unmuted. His face was tense. "My company went down during the October outage. Six hours offline. We lost two major customers. My CEO is asking what we're doing to prevent this. I've done everything you've described—multi-region, chaos tests, the works. But I don't know how to communicate it to non-technical executives. How do I tell them we're safe now?"

Sarah's entire demeanor changed. This was her section.

"David, I'm going to give you the exact words I used with our board. Feel free to steal them verbatim."

She pulled up a document and shared her screen.

THE CONFIDENCE BRIEF — EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION

"This isn't a budget request. This is a mission accomplished briefing. Here's the structure:

Opening (30 seconds):
'Following the AWS outage, our engineering team conducted a comprehensive audit of our infrastructure. I want to share what we found, what we fixed, and why you can be confident in our resilience moving forward.'

What We Found (1 minute):
'We identified three critical vulnerabilities: hard-coded region dependencies, insufficient failover mechanisms, and lack of automated redundancy. These weren't new problems—they'd existed for years. The outage revealed them.'

What We Fixed (2 minutes):
'We implemented multi-region architecture across all customer-facing services. We deployed automated health checks and failover routing. We established DynamoDB Global Tables for data replication. Most importantly, we tested these systems under simulated failure conditions.'

Proof It Works (1 minute):
'We ran controlled chaos experiments. We intentionally failed our primary region during business hours. Our systems automatically failed over to our secondary region. Customers experienced no downtime. We have metrics showing 99.97% uptime during the test.'

What This Means (30 seconds):
'The next time AWS has a regional outage—and there will be a next time—our customers will not be affected. We will continue processing transactions, serving content, and maintaining service. You can communicate this to our customers and our board with complete confidence.'

The Close:
'We're not leaving this to chance anymore. We're protected.'"

Sarah looked directly at the camera. "David, that last line is the most important. You're not asking for permission. You're not requesting budget. You're telling them: We saw the threat. We eliminated it. We're safe now."

Marcus added: "Exactly. And that's just the direct costs. When we stayed up during the October outage while competitors went dark, we closed a $4.8M deal within 24 hours. The client literally said: 'We watched three vendors. Two failed. You didn't.'"

David's shoulders visibly relaxed. "Can I get a copy of that?"

"I'll drop it in the chat right now," Sarah said. "Everyone should have this."

Question 5: "What Can We Do Monday Morning?"

The chat was exploding with questions now. Marcus held up a hand.

"Alright, I see variations of 'what's the fastest thing we can do' about 20 times. Let me give you the Monday morning checklist. These are things you can do in one day—some in one hour—that will materially improve your resilience."

THE MONDAY MORNING CHECKLIST:

"Hour 1: The Audit
Open your AWS console. Go to every service you use. Write down which region it's in. If 100% of your resources are in one region, you have single-point-of-failure risk. That's your biggest problem.

Hour 2: Hard-Coded Regions
Search your codebase for 'us-east-1' or 'region_name='. Every hard-coded region is a ticking time bomb. Change them to environment variables or configuration files. This costs zero dollars and takes 30 minutes.

Hour 3: Critical Service Identification
List every service that directly impacts customer experience. Not backend jobs. Not admin tools. Customer-facing services only. These get priority for multi-region deployment.

Hour 4: Route 53 Health Checks
Set up basic health checks for your critical endpoints. This is free up to 50 health checks. If your primary region goes down, at least you'll know about it immediately.

The Rest of the Day: Documentation
Document your current architecture. Draw it out. Where does traffic flow? What happens if each piece fails? You can't fix what you can't see.

By End of Day:
You should know exactly which services are vulnerable and have a prioritized plan for fixing them. That's huge progress for Day 1."

Elena, the solo founder, unmuted again. "That's... actually manageable. I thought this would take weeks."

"The audit and identification?" Marcus said. "One day. The implementation? That depends on your complexity. But knowing where you're vulnerable? That's a Monday."

Question 6: "How Much Will This Really Cost?"

Someone from the chat asked the question Sarah had been waiting for.

"Let me give you real numbers," Sarah said, pulling up a spreadsheet. "These are actual costs from companies I've talked to in the last week."

REAL COSTS BY COMPANY STAGE:

"Startup (under $1K/month AWS):
Multi-region for one critical service: +$50-$150/month
Route 53 health checks: Free (under 50 checks)
DynamoDB Global Tables: +$30-$80/month
Total added cost: ~$100-$250/month

Growing Company ($5K-$20K/month AWS):
Multi-region for core services: +$2,000-$4,000/month
Enhanced monitoring: +$200-$400/month
Chaos engineering tools: ~$100/month
Total added cost: ~$2,500-$5,000/month

Scale Company ($50K+/month AWS):
Full multi-region architecture: +$15,000-$30,000/month
Enterprise chaos engineering: +$1,000-$2,000/month
Dedicated DevOps resources: (headcount, not AWS)
Total added cost: ~$20,000-$40,000/month

"But here's the other side of the equation," Sarah continued. "I talked to a CTO this week whose company went down for 6 hours during the October outage. Six hours cost them $200K in delayed transactions and support costs. Their new multi-region architecture costs them $4,200/month. That one outage would have paid for 48 months of resilience."

Marcus nodded. "And that's not counting the customers we kept because competitors went dark. We've heard that story a dozen times this week."

The Question That Stopped the Call

A quiet voice unmuted from the bottom of the participant list. "I'm sorry, this might be a stupid question, but... is it too late?"

Marcus and Sarah exchanged glances.

"What's your name?" Sarah asked gently.

"Tom. I'm a senior engineer at a Series B fintech company. We went down during October 20th. Lost a major customer. I've been trying to push for this kind of architecture for two years. Management always said it wasn't a priority. Now they're blaming engineering for the outage. I'm worried about my job."

The Zoom went silent.

Sarah spoke first. "Tom, this is exactly why we're doing this call. It's not too late. But you need to reframe the conversation."

Marcus leaned in. "You're not asking for permission anymore. You're presenting the solution. Use the executive brief Sarah shared. But add this: 'We have a choice. We can continue hoping AWS never goes down again, or we can build systems that work when they do. One is a wish. The other is engineering.'"

"And Tom?" Sarah added. "If your management still doesn't prioritize this after a customer-losing outage, that's not a company that values engineering. There are better places to work. But give them one chance to do the right thing."

Tom nodded slowly. "Thank you. That... helps."

The Close

At 8:47 PM, two hours and 47 minutes after starting, Marcus looked at the 47 faces still on the call.

"Here's what I want you to take away: AWS will go down again. Not if—when. The difference between companies that survive and companies that don't is simple. Some hope it won't happen. Others build systems that work anyway. Be the second kind."

Sarah added: "We'll send everyone the slides from tonight, plus that executive brief template and our architecture diagrams. But don't wait for the email. Start your audit Monday morning."

"And one more thing," Marcus said. "We'll do this call again in two weeks. Same time. Bring your questions, bring your architecture diagrams, bring your problems. We'll work through them together."

"Because," Sarah finished, "we're not competitors in this. We're all trying to keep our companies alive and our people employed. That's bigger than any one company."

The chat exploded with thank-yous.

Elena, the solo founder, typed: "You might have just saved my startup."

Priya: "This is what the tech community should be. Thank you both."

Joe, the healthcare CTO: "Same time in two weeks. I'll be there with my chaos test results."

Marcus closed his laptop and looked at Sarah. "Think we helped?"

Sarah showed him her phone. Three new emails from people on the call. Two already implementing the Monday morning checklist. One from a CTO asking if TextMiner was hiring because "I want to work with people who think like this."

"Yeah," Sarah said. "We helped."

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What You Can Do Now

This Monday:

1. Run the audit (Hour 1)
2. Find your hard-coded regions (Hour 2)
3. Identify critical services (Hour 3)
4. Set up basic health checks (Hour 4)
5. Document everything (rest of day)

This Month:

1. Deploy your most critical service to a second region
2. Test failover manually
3. Set up DynamoDB Global Tables if you use DynamoDB
4. Run your first chaos experiment in staging
5. Brief your executives using Sarah's template

This Quarter:

1. Multi-region for all customer-facing services
2. Automated chaos testing
3. Documented runbooks
4. Team training on incident response
5. Confidence to tell your CEO: "We're protected now."

The next AWS outage is coming.

The question is: Will you be ready?

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Aaron Rose is a software engineer and technology writer at tech-reader.blog and the author of Think Like a Genius.