Plan for Disaster Recovery

Define recovery objectives for downtime and data loss

• RTO:

  • Recovery Time Objective = How much time an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business.

  • Maximum acceptable delay between the interruption of service and restoration of service.

• RPO:

  • Recovery Point Objective = How much data that can be lost before significant harm to the business occurs.

  • Maximum acceptable amount of time since the last data recovery point.

Use defined recovery strategies to meet the recovery objectives

• Backup and restore:

  • RPO/RTO = Hours

  • Back up your data and applications using point-in-time backups into the DR Region.

    • Restore this data when necessary to recover from a disaster.

• Pilot light:

  • RPO = 10s of minutes

  • Replicate your data from one region to another and provision a copy of your core workload infrastructure.

• Warm standby:

  • RPO/RTO = Minutes

  • Maintain a scaled-down but fully functional version of your workload always running in the DR Region.

• Multi-site (active-active)

  • RPO/RTO = Near zero

  • Workload runs on AWS as well as on your existing on-site infrastructure in an active-active configuration.

• Multi-region:

  • RPO/RTO = Near zero

  • Your workload is deployed to, and actively serving traffic from, multiple AWS Regions.

  • Requires you to synchronize data across Regions.

Implement features like Backups, Multi-AZ, Replication to help disaster recovery

Automate recovery

• Use AWS or third-party tools to automate system recovery and route traffic to the DR site or region.