The AWS outage was a stark reminder of how dependent modern organisations have become on single-cloud infrastructures. For many, it meant disrupted customer experiences, delayed operations, and frustrated teams working late to restore continuity. But the real question for me wasn’t why AWS went down, it’s why so many businesses weren’t ready when it did.

The fragility of single-cloud dependence

Cloud computing has transformed the speed and scale of software delivery, but a single-cloud strategy remains a single point of failure. When one provider experiences a regional or platform-level incident, dependent workloads stop instantly. Digital resilience isn’t guaranteed by a single provider, it’s engineered by the organisation consuming the service. It’s built through continuous testing, intelligent automation, and architectures that can adapt when something breaks.

Testing for the inevitable

Outages, latency spikes, and degraded services are not rare events; they’re inevitable in any complex system. The teams that recover fastest are those that have tested these scenarios before they happen

Using IBM DevOps Test teams can:

• Simulate cloud outages and degraded services across AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, and on-prem environments.
• Model network disruptions and dependency failures to understand how systems behave under stress.
• Validate recovery time, failover automation, and resilience as part of the delivery pipeline.

This makes resilience measurable and repeatable, not theoretical.

Software engineering productivity through portability: Containerised DevOps pipelines

One of the most effective ways to reduce cloud dependency in software engineering is to use a containerised software delivery pipeline. When plan,  create, build, deploy, test and release stages run in portable containers, teams gain flexibility to lift and shift between cloud environments, or operate in hybrid cloud environments.

This approach enables:

• Hybrid and multi-cloud — run the same DevOps workflows on IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, or on-prem.
• Rapid recovery — if one provider experiences downtime, delivery can be moved elsewhere.
• Productivity — developers stay productive instead of waiting for a single cloud to recover.

A containerised delivery pipeline can ensure software maintenance, security validation and innovation continues, keeping software delivery teams focused on progress, not just recovery.

IBM DevOps Loop: AI-First, cloud-agnostic, and complete

To support modern software engineering, IBM introduced IBM DevOps Loop, an AI-first software delivery platform that unifies software engineering across roles within a single intelligent environment. Built on containers, IBM DevOps Loop can run on any cloud or hybrid-cloud infrastructure, giving teams performance and portability across environments. And crucially, IBM DevOps Test is a core component of DevOps Loop, implementing the reality that testing is not a stage, it’s an essential part of every project, and a continuous thread running through the entire delivery lifecycle.

With IBM DevOps Loop, teams can:

• Automate continuous quality gates which can be run by AI agents.
• Incorporate performance, reliability, and security testing throughout the pipeline.
• Correlate data with metrics for end-to-end visibility.
• Run anywhere — from IBM Cloud to AWS, Azure, or private environments — thanks to its container-native design.

The result is software delivery that is AI-driven, portable, and focused on productivity.

The power of hybrid-cloud

A hybrid-cloud strategy supported by IBM DevOps Loop lets organisations benchmark and validate performance wherever their workloads run. By comparing results across providers, regions, and architectures, teams can identify bottlenecks, optimise for cost and reliability, and continuously validate service-level objectives. The outcome is software engineering that’s cloud-agnostic, intelligent, and resilient.

From reaction to readiness

When the next major outage happens, and it seems inevitable that it will, the difference between downtime and resilience will depend on preparation. Teams that treat outages as testable, measurable events will recover faster. They’ll be the teams that keep delivering while others wait for their single provider to reboot.  Resilience isn’t luck. It’s engineered through AI-driven delivery on a containerised DevOps platform that puts productivity first. When developers can keep shipping code, you’ve moved beyond just trying to recover - you’ve achieved resilience by design.

Learn more about IBM DevOps Loop at ibm.com/products/devops-loop