High Availability Is Not Resilience: Why Cloud Systems Fail When It Matters Most
InfoQ, Thursday, October 1st, 2026
Multi-region architectures can still fail through shared control-plane dependencies, so resilience must be tested, not assumed.
In an InfoQ article, Alexey Golev argues high availability can mask a lack of resilience when failures fall outside design assumptions, describing a TLS 1.3 upgrade that silently broke Route 53 health checks requiring TLS 1.2, causing a CDN to drop an otherwise healthy region.
Multi-region designs can still share dependencies such as DNS health checks, IAM and routing.
Golev warns against 'performative resilience' where recovery is assumed, urging explicit ownership, recurring failover testing and maintained recovery procedures to expose hidden dependencies.