Major AWS Outage: Did Your Service Go Down Too? An Alternative to Cloud-Native

On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major incident in its US East (us-east-1) region that lasted over 12 hours, causing simultaneous service disruptions for countless companies worldwide. The root cause was identified as a DNS resolution issue with its core database service, DynamoDB. The impact quickly spread, affecting popular applications like Snapchat and Roblox, as well as critical infrastructure in the finance and aviation sectors. This outage once again highlighted a long-standing problem: when we tie all our infrastructure to a single cloud provider, an anomaly in any one region can lead to a global shutdown.

The incident originated in AWS's largest and oldest data center in Northern Virginia. A seemingly routine technical update went wrong, preventing the Domain Name System (DNS) from correctly resolving addresses for the critical DynamoDB service. DNS acts as the internet's phone book, translating website names into computer-readable numerical addresses. When this "phone book" failed, applications could no longer find DynamoDB, triggering a chain reaction that ultimately caused 113 AWS services to fail.

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1. The Three Major Problems with Cloud-Native: Expensive, Complex, and Hard to Migrate

The design philosophy of Cloud-Native is "no need to manage servers"—developers simply call services. But behind this glossy slogan lie three significant pain points in practice:

1. Expensive Although the initial pay-as-you-go model seems flexible, as business traffic grows, the request and data transfer fees for services like Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB can quickly exceed the cost of a dedicated server. For services requiring long-term, stable operation, a cloud-native architecture is almost always more expensive.
2. Overly Complex To fully migrate a system to a cloud-native architecture, it's common to integrate more than a dozen different services. Each service has its unique limitations, complex permission settings, and proprietary monitoring methods. Maintaining such a "serverless" architecture paradoxically requires deeper expertise and more manpower.
3. Vendor Lock-in Every cloud provider has its own unique APIs and service logic. Once you heavily use specific features, such as AWS DynamoDB's query patterns or CloudWatch's alerting system, it becomes difficult to migrate to other platforms seamlessly. During the us-east-1 incident, many companies were shocked to discover their dependence on a single region was far deeper than they had imagined.

In other words, the "convenience" of Cloud-Native comes at the cost of giving up your freedom of choice.

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2. The Opposite Philosophy of VPS: Simple, Cheap, and Portable

In stark contrast to Cloud-Native is the more traditional Virtual Private Server (VPS) model. Its strength lies in its "transparency and consistency":

• You can freely choose any cloud provider (like Linode, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or even AWS's own EC2).
• You can install familiar, standardized services (like Docker, MySQL, Redis).
• All communication is based on universal protocols (like HTTP, SQL, SSH).

This model makes a multi-cloud architecture naturally feasible. You can easily replicate and back up services across different providers and even form high-availability clusters at a minimal cost, fundamentally avoiding single points of failure.

Of course, the downside of the VPS model is also clear: it requires someone with the expertise to configure and maintain it. For small teams without a dedicated Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), this has always been a significant hurdle.

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3. Zeabur AI DevOps Agent: Making VPS Architecture Just as Simple

This is precisely the problem the Zeabur AI DevOps Agent aims to solve.

It allows developers to enjoy the flexibility and control of a VPS architecture without needing to understand the complex details of the underlying cloud infrastructure.

The AI Agent can automate the following tedious tasks:

• Building high-availability architectures across different VPS providers.
• Automating deployment, monitoring, scaling, restarting, and backups.
• Providing service health checks, performance analysis, and cost reports.
• Migrating applications to another provider with a single click.

The end result: You get the ease of use of a cloud-native service while retaining the low cost, portability, and multi-cloud freedom of the VPS model.

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4. Conclusion

This massive AWS outage serves as a wake-up call for all businesses. Cloud-Native is suitable for specific scenarios that require extreme automation and short-term elasticity. However, for most services that need long-term stability, it is expensive, complex, and inflexible.

The VPS architecture, though traditional, is simpler, more direct, and cost-effective. Now, with an AI DevOps Engineer like Zeabur, the biggest pain point of "maintenance hassle" can be automated.

Ultimately, we no longer have to make the difficult choice between "convenient but locked-in" and "free but cumbersome." AI allows us, for the first time, to have the best of both worlds and truly take control of our service's destiny.