Cloud Disaster Recovery

The first layer of cloud DR is multi-AZ deployment. We configure RDS Multi-AZ for automatic database failover, spread application instances across AZs with ALB health checks, and use EBS volumes with multi-AZ replication. Multi-AZ handles the most common failure modes — hardware failure, AZ-level network issues — with automatic failover and zero data loss. This is the minimum viable DR for any production workload.

For region-level DR, we implement cross-region architectures matched to your targets. Pilot light: minimal infrastructure in the secondary region, scaled up during failover. Warm standby: reduced-capacity deployment in the secondary region, ready to accept traffic. Active-active: full deployment in both regions with traffic routing. Each pattern has different cost, RTO, and complexity tradeoffs that we analyze for your specific workload.

Your secondary region is provisioned from the same Terraform/Pulumi codebase as production — different variable files, same modules. This guarantees parity between environments. DR infrastructure is deployed and maintained continuously, not spun up during an emergency. GitOps workflows ensure configuration drift is detected and corrected automatically. The DR environment is always ready because it is always running.

Route 53 health checks or Cloudflare load balancing detect primary region failures and route traffic to the secondary region. Database promotion is automated — Aurora Global Database promotes the secondary cluster in under a minute. Application deployments in the secondary region are pre-scaled to handle production traffic. Runbooks cover manual steps for edge cases. Quarterly DR drills validate the entire failover chain end-to-end.