Suggestions on Unifi Cloud Key Backups or Hot swappable Controller?

I own a Gen 2 Plus cloud key for my unifi switches. A funny thing happened to me this morning is that there was a problem with the cloud key connecting to the network after a restart of the switch. I probably took 30 minutes or so for the device “to magically activate”. My management interfaces for the switches and access points run on VLAN 40. I have other devices where traffic is tagged to various ports. During the 30 minute period - any VLAN tagged traffic wouldn’t ingress/egress. Devices on the untagged traffic functioned normally, everything else that relied on tagged traffic – down.

I honestly was very alarmed. One simple cloud key that cant obtain network access - and the rest of the entire network significantly effected. I’m not sure if this is the norm or the exception.

This got me thinking – is there a way to have an active “hot swap” of the cloud key in place? Yes I’m sure its easy to have a physical backup cloudkey, but I was thinking more of a virtualized cloud key installation. It would seem this would have to be on the untagged network for it to function properly. I contacted the people at Unifi and they said they didn’t offer anything for this scenario and just told me a method of how to switch controllers if I wanted – which although helpful this advice didn’t even come close to address the shortcomings of the situation.

Has anyone else come across a scenario like this or come up with a method to mitigate such a circumstance?

I have a customer that I support who uses Unifi routers/firewalls, switches, APs and cloud keys. The cloud keys have died multiple times and there are better solutions out there that don’t need on-prem hardware to support cloud based management. Meraki comes to mind… The ACL policy mgmt on the firewalls isn’t very intuitive either, especially when dealing with inter-vlan traffic. The APs and switches seem pretty solid though. Just not a fan of their routers or cloud keys.