IT infrastructure has become cheap. Building a highly available system with multi-machine, multi-datacenter, even multi-regional architectures can be easily achieved with just a credit card. Building fast-performing systems on top became the defacto standard for computing and data storage. Today more and more effort is put into vertical and horizontal scaling to achieve lower latency and to reach customers faster. And while in general, this is a good idea, the cost for these kinds of architectures is not just money. Scaling a ‘simple’ website to a multi-regional approach can easily take tens of machines, all always on, all ready to perform on the incoming requests.
High availability should not come at the cost of keeping more machines running all the time.