I assume most organizations, both small and large, just host on whatever provider they know or that costs them the least. If you have budget maybe you deploy to multiple providers for redundancy? But that increases cost and complexity.
Who’s going to bother with colo given the cost / complexity? Who’s going to run a server from their office given ISP restrictions and downtime fears?
What is the realistic antidote here?
To fix it, test your failback procedures. For everything else, there's nothing to fix, it's working by design.
My CI was down for 2 hours this morning, despite not even being on AWS. We have a set of credentials on that host that we call assumeRole with and push to an S3 bucket, which has a lambda that duplicates to buckets in other regions. All our IAM calls were failing due to this outage, and we have 0 items deployed in us-east-1 (we're european)
One thing that AWS should do is provide an easier way to detect these hidden dependencies. You can do that with CloudTrail if you know how to do it (filter operations by region and check that none are in us-east-1), but a more explicit service would be nice.
The problem was we couldn’t log into cloud trail, or the console at all, to identify that, because IAM identity center is single region. This was a decision recommended by AWS, and blessed by our (army of) SRE teams.
The hindsight is 20/20, of course, it's a good practice to audit CloudTrail periodically for unexpected regional dependencies.
(1) offer void for services that run on AWS.
Either way, we would have only made it one step farther in our CI, as the next step is to build a conatiner with a base image from docker hub, and that was down too. The idea of running a multi region nexus repository to avoid Docker hub outages for my 14 person engineering team seems slightly overkill!
It's actually an interesting exercise to enumerate _all_ the external dependencies. But yeah, avoiding them all seems to be less than helpful for the vast majority of users.
For most of what I run these days, I'd rather just have someone else run and administer my database. Same with my load balancers. And my Kubernetes cluster. I don't really care if there is an outage every 2 years.
I don't think there is a "most" organizations. Either they're looking for big cloud or they're not, and least-cost is usually the last consideration when looking at any cloud, because you're trying to pay a premium to get particular advantages.
The realistic antidote? Move to a less-shitty region. Or architect your systems to be failure-resilient.
(Most people seem to think the entire region was offline? That's wrong. It was just particular services which wouldn't process control plane requests, and then a failure cascade caused more problems. But things that were already started running before, stayed running. A region is multiple datacenters. Even AZs are often multiple datacenters. It's virtually impossible for a whole region to stop working.)
And colo and datacenters aren't immune to going down