99.99% availability looks simple on an diagram. In production, it is anything but.

In this session, I share lessons from designing and operating a mission-critical Azure platform where downtime was not an option. We’ll explore the real architectural trade-offs behind high availability. From multi-region networking and identity resilience to data replication strategies and disaster recovery design.

But reliability is not just technical. Platforms exist inside organizations with varying cloud maturity, evolving priorities, and constant change. Designing for 99.99% availability means aligning architecture with that reality and leading when both systems and people are under pressure.

This session provides practical design principles, hard lessons, and organizational insights for architects and platform teams building high-availability Azure environments in the real world.