Thanks a lot! You are totally right, it is for sure something we will find a solution for. But honestly, do I not want to. As a startup, you have very few resources and deliberately place some exact bets. Deprioritizing everything to work on something for a long time that was not prioritized, just to then end up again where you were before (a working cloud solution) is the last thing any startup should be forced to do. Anyway, it seems like we do not have much choice here.
I hear you. It's not a fun position to be in. And sometimes you're correct to take calculated risks and maybe the expected value was positive here, despite what ended up happening.
Without knowing the details about your services and infrastructure, it's hard for me to know what's involved in going multi-region now. Are you sure it's such a a gargantuan effort? I would've thought one person working full-time on this for a week or two would be enough, but again I don't know the details of your setup.
One option would be to pay a consultant who is an expert in Azure/cloud stuff to come in and help. May not be cheap, but could be a lot better and quicker for you and better for the business, especially if none of you are really big experts in Azure.
I've been here before (I think)...had to wear many hats and scramble to make sales, build the tech, act as de facto DevOps person even without a lot of experience doing it, etc. That is the way, but stuff happens.
Happy to chat about specifics if you want to bounce ideas off of me or go through your particular situation. Can't promise I'll have concrete advice, but happy to talk it through.
Thanks a lot, is really super nice of you and appreciated! Luckily we have somebody very knowledgeable on our team. Will tell him to reach out if he wants to have a peer to brain-storm some ideas.
I disagree with the other poster you should have been multiregion from the start. It adds a load of complexity and failure cases for early stage Startups.
Very poor position to be in, apparently this happened in azure UK recently too.
I do not think is a bad idea to be multi-region from start. For the most part Azure has at least two regions in each country (Germany North/West Central, UK South/West, Sweden South/Central, Norway East / West, UAE North / Central, France Central / South etc....)So if stuff happens being able to bring up your service in a different region in the same country could be helpful. I do not know specifics but it seems to me that having an abstraction layer on top of the region is not that hard to do (most of Azure services are supported in all regions). OF course, is a lot easier if done at the outset. Being forced to do it quickly and with little notice is no fun at all....
I feel for you. Also it sucks to be in this position.
Let the scar you get from this is be a learning experience, hopefully you will not fall into the same trap again to trust this company.
In my career I'm in a place where anyone suggesting I do work on Azure gets an instant doubling of my asking day-rate and I really hope the will be put off and find another victim for this gig.
That said, another learning experience would be to use terraform or something (tbh for azure the only sane thing is terraform, ARM templates are just garbage). Having terraformed your one region switching to the other would be much easier, tho not trivial.
