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...