When Failure Is Not an Option： Surviving Cloud Outages in Go - Kevin Holditch

What does it take to run a real-time payment platform that never sleeps—even when your cloud provider does? In this talk, we’ll take you inside Form3’s journey from a single-cloud AWS setup running Java and managed services, to a next-generation, cloud-agnostic, active/active/active architecture spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure—all powered by Go. You’ll hear how signing a tier-1 bank forced us to rethink everything: 10x performance targets, financial-grade SLAs, and the UK regulator’s demand for zero cloud lock-in. We’ll dive into how we designed our v2 platform using Kubernetes, CockroachDB, and NATS to achieve unprecedented levels of availability and portability—and how we now run disaster recovery tests in production by intentionally taking out an entire cloud provider for 24 hours with no customer impact. If you’ve ever wondered whether multi-cloud is a myth or magic, this talk will show you how Form3 makes it real—every day, at scale, in Go. Kevin Holditch, VP of Engineering at Form3, gives his insightful keynote at GopherConUK 2025 on the 14-15th August. vrnIrHsG7HE