A VP Engineering pushed back on me last month: "We have to go multi-region. Our enterprise clients demand it." I asked: "Does the contract specify RTO and RPO?

Or just the word 'multi-region'?" "Just the word." That's almost always the case. Let me explain the actual tradeoffs. Multi-AZ deployment: → 99.95% SLA from AWS (the actual SLA, not marketing) → Cross-AZ latency: 1-2ms → Cost overhead: ~1