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.

PreviousTransit GatewayNextDatabase Migration Service (DMS)

Last updated