How To Run on Three Clouds at Once, and When Not To

If you've made a bank transfer recently, there's a good chance that Form3 handled it. When we have a wobble, people notice. So when the UK's payments regulator said they were worried about cloud concentration risk, we knew we had a challenge ahead: we needed to keep running when our cloud provider failed. What followed was a company-wide effort to unpick our cloud-specific dependencies and replace them with a cloud-agnostic active/active/active architecture spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure. We'll break down the design trade-offs, operational costs, dead-ends, and hard slog needed to build this platform. We'll share what we've learned from the experience of several years' operation, and what really happens when a cloud falls over.

On the other side of the pond, we'll look at how we needed to adapt this multi-cloud architecture to a new market. We quickly learned that dominant perceptions in the US would prevent us from lifting and shift our solution from the UK, so we had to re-evaluate our choices and ultimately take a step backward to achieve market fit. We'll look at the power of 'resilience stories', how we architected to address them, and how we handled our first major incident without the comfort of active/active/active multi-cloud.

Key Takeaways:

• How to run real-world active/active/active multi-cloud
• When to lean on cloud's hosted offerings, and when to stay agnostic
• How to adapt architecture to fit resilience narratives