Always on; always Smarty: High availability design and engineering best practices
When the digital world falters, our goal is simple: stay steady for our customers.
At Smarty, reliability isn’t a bragging point, but rather a promise.
We’ve built a platform designed to keep running even when others stop, using a vendor-agnostic, redundant infrastructure grounded in engineering best practices that weather disruptions with quiet consistency.
Our customers depend on uninterrupted address data services.
And, we take that trust seriously.
And because we trust you, we’re offering a 42-day free trial on every product. You can also test a few of our products right now without signing up for a free trial account. Alternatively, continue reading to learn about how Smarty stays up when others go down.
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In this blog, we’ll cover:
- A resilient foundation
- Resiliency built into every layer
- Built to stay up when others go down
- Observability and calm under pressure
- Always operational; always improving
- A steady presence for our customers
A resilient foundation
Smarty’s systems are distributed across multiple providers and data centers in different geographic regions. No single vendor, cloud region, or data center defines our uptime. Instead, each operates as part of a coordinated network designed for continuity and resilience—a model of multi-cloud architecture that ensures flexibility, scalability, and resilience across every environment.
If one cloud stumbles, another takes the load. If regional latency increases, requests are rerouted automatically to healthier systems.
Why? Because failures do happen and have happened.
In 2013 and in 2020, Microsoft Azure experienced provider-wide downtime.
In 2011, 2017, and 2021, various critical services on AWS went dark.
In 2025, Google Cloud (GCP), AWS, and Microsoft Azure all experienced significant outages.
However, Smarty’s cloud-agnostic, fully redundant architecture ensured everything ran smoothly, keeping customers unaffected and experiencing zero downtime.
Our CEO, Jonathan Oliver, explains our strategy best:
“We want to try to figure out where the single points of failure are. A single point of failure could be as small as a machine or as large as an entire provider. When designing for high availability, you must chart your dependency graph because, while you might think you have no single points of failure, an underlying dependency, which appears to be distributed, depends on something else that contains a single point of failure. Look at app dependencies and cloud dependencies. Consider how to limit the blast radius of these types of failures. When something goes wrong, you need to know how much that will affect other systems.”
(For more resiliency information directly from JO, feel free to watch the opening session of our first-ever user conference, Pinpoint.)
Thankfully, because we recognize that systems will fail, every piece of infrastructure at Smarty has a backup, and that backup has its own.
This multi-provider, multi-region deployment design is foundational. It’s what allows our APIs to stay responsive, our data to stay secure, and our customers to stay connected even when the internet feels a little disconnected or unstable due to other major provider disruptions.
Smarty’s resilience strategy
Resiliency built into every layer
We’ve built our platform with a high-availability design, similar to a series of safety nets.
At the network edge, redundant DNS providers ensure that no single failure can block requests from reaching us. Intelligent load balancing distributes traffic globally, routing each request along the fastest and most reliable path.
Within our orchestration layer, containerized workloads move seamlessly between regions. If one node becomes unhealthy, others automatically take over. Updates, scaling, and configuration changes happen in real-time without maintenance windows or downtime.
Every component, from compute to networking to monitoring, is defined as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This provides us with precision, repeatability, and the ability to recover or redeploy infrastructure in minutes, ensuring full traceability of each request.
Built to stay up when others go down
When major providers experience outages, many high-profile companies go dark. Smarty’s doesn’t.
Smarty’s vendor-agnostic approach–rooted in multi-cloud architecture and engineering best practices–enables us to dynamically shift traffic between providers without requiring human intervention.
We’ve intentionally avoided building dependencies on any single ecosystem so that when disruptions hit—whether from a global IT incident or a regional network failure—our customers’ operations continue unaffected.
We meant what we said earlier. Your trust is important to us.
And, this resilience isn’t just theoretical.
During widespread outages, our systems have remained online, delivering address validation, autocomplete, and geocoding services without interruption. Smarty has an over 99.999% historical uptime, which we wear as a badge of honor.
We view that as validation of the approach we’ve always believed in: prepare for failure so our customers never have to experience it.
Let’s back that up with some data.
Target SLA and uptimes
Each Smarty product is architected and managed with unique operational requirements in mind. Referenced in the table below is a detailed overview of how uptime and expected response time are handled for individual API products.
Even though this is our guarantee, Smarty likes to overdeliver. You’ll frequently find us going much faster than our SLA-guaranteed latency response times.
Example observations of uptime statistics (measured in microseconds, not milliseconds):
*Load times for a single instance of a US Street API status page during the great AWS outage of ‘25.
Observability and calm under pressure
Staying online isn’t just about architecture, though.
It’s also about awareness.
Using these observability tools, Smarty maintains comprehensive operational insight into every aspect of the platform:
- Metrics provide visibility into system health and performance trends.
- Logs capture granular event data for troubleshooting.
- Alerts proactively notify teams of deviations from normal behavior.
Our monitoring strategy focuses on early detection, automated response, and continuous improvement, ensuring that performance issues are identified and resolved before they impact customers.
Our observability tools continuously monitor performance, latency, and health across all providers and regions, ensuring seamless operation.
The moment something behaves outside of normal thresholds, automated systems adjust routing, notify engineers, and trigger recovery processes.
This constant visibility lets us respond before users notice a difference.
Always operational, always improving
Smarty’s infrastructure evolves constantly through small, deliberate improvements. Every deployment happens through rolling updates, keeping services available while new code, configurations, or optimizations are introduced.
It’s how we maintain near-100% uptime without sacrificing progress.
A steady presence for our customers
Smarty’s platform reflects a culture of engineering wizardry and operational reliability.
In an industry where even the biggest providers can experience sudden outages, our mission is to be the stable point in the chaos—the lighthouse in the storm.
Smarty’s platform is designed to continue working quietly when it matters most. Because for our customers, every validated address, every geocoded coordinate, and every successful API call represents someone counting on us to deliver.
And that’s something worth staying up for.
Want to see what a reliable provider looks like for your business? Here’s our transparent pricing model. Sign up for a free trial today for any of the products you see on the left-hand side of your screen after clicking that handy, dandy link.
