Cloud dependencies, particularly managed services provided by companies like AWS, pose both opportunities and challenges due to their external control and potential for failure, which can lead to cascading effects on applications relying on them. To mitigate these risks, businesses can utilize tools like Gremlin to simulate service outages and assess their systems' resilience through the Well-Architected Cloud Test Suite, which evaluates handling of slow or unresponsive connections and certificate issues. By leveraging techniques such as caching, asynchronous calls, and redundant services, organizations can enhance reliability and prepare for eventualities such as service failures. Additionally, Gremlin's platform allows for proactive testing and monitoring of services to maintain high availability and performance, ensuring that systems are resilient to disruptions in cloud-based dependencies.