Disaster Recovery — Have a Plan That Actually Works When Everything Goes Down
Every team says they have disaster recovery. Most have not tested it. When the primary region goes down at 2 AM, the recovery plan should not require reading a Confluence page and manually running 30 commands. We design and implement DR strategies with automated failover, tested recovery procedures, and documented RTO/RPO targets that are validated by actual drills, not wishful thinking.
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DR Strategies by Recovery Objective
Your DR strategy depends on two numbers: RTO (Recovery Time Objective — how long can you be down?) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective — how much data can you lose?). These are business decisions, not technical ones. A B2B SaaS with a 4-hour RTO needs a different strategy than a payment processor with a 30-second RTO.
Backup & Restore (RTO: hours, RPO: hours): The simplest and cheapest strategy. Backups are stored in a secondary region. Recovery means provisioning infrastructure from IaC and restoring data from backups. Works for applications where hours of downtime are acceptable. We automate the restoration process so it is a single pipeline run, not a manual procedure.
Pilot Light (RTO: 10-30 minutes, RPO: minutes): A minimal infrastructure (database replica, core networking) runs in the DR region at all times. On failure, compute resources are provisioned from IaC and connected to the already-running database. Data loss is limited to replication lag — typically seconds to minutes. This balances cost and recovery speed.
Warm Standby (RTO: minutes, RPO: seconds): A scaled-down version of the full application runs in the DR region at all times. On failure, traffic is rerouted and the standby scales up to handle full production load. Data replication is synchronous or near-synchronous. This is more expensive but recovers in minutes.
Active-Active (RTO: ~0, RPO: ~0): The application runs in multiple regions simultaneously, serving traffic from both. If one region fails, the other absorbs the load without any failover process. This requires application-level support for multi-region writes and conflict resolution. It is the most expensive and complex option but provides near-zero downtime.
Our DR Implementation
Data Replication: We configure cross-region replication for every stateful service. RDS cross-region read replicas provide continuous data replication with lag under 1 second. S3 Cross-Region Replication copies objects to the DR region within 15 minutes. DynamoDB Global Tables replicate in under 1 second. ElastiCache Global Datastore replicates Redis across regions. All replication is configured via Terraform so it is reproducible and auditable.
Infrastructure as Code: Your entire infrastructure is defined in Terraform, parameterized for multi-region deployment. The DR region uses the same modules with region-specific variables. We validate this by deploying to the DR region during drills — proving the code works, not just hoping it does.
DNS Failover: Route 53 health checks monitor your primary region's endpoints. When checks fail, DNS automatically routes traffic to the DR region. We configure appropriate TTLs (60 seconds for critical services) and health check intervals (10 seconds) to minimize detection and failover time. For active-active, we use latency-based routing with health check failover.
Automated Recovery: We build a recovery pipeline that can be triggered manually or automatically. The pipeline: promotes the database replica to primary, scales up compute in the DR region, updates configuration to point to DR resources, runs smoke tests to verify the recovery, and sends notifications on completion. The entire process is scripted — no SSH sessions, no console clicking, no remembering which commands to run.
DR Drills: We set up quarterly DR drills that execute the full recovery process. The drill deploys to the DR region, validates that the application works correctly with replicated data, runs the test suite, and then tears down. Drill results are documented with actual RTO/RPO measurements. Any issues found are fixed immediately — a drill that reveals problems is successful.
What You Get
A tested, automated disaster recovery implementation:
- DR strategy — backup/restore, pilot light, warm standby, or active-active based on your RTO/RPO
- Data replication — cross-region replication for all stateful services
- DNS failover — Route 53 health checks with automatic traffic rerouting
- Recovery pipeline — automated recovery procedure triggered by a single command
- Quarterly drills — scheduled DR tests with documented results and measured RTO/RPO
- Runbook — step-by-step recovery procedures for manual fallback
- Cost analysis — DR infrastructure cost breakdown and optimization recommendations
- Compliance documentation — DR documentation suitable for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and auditor review
Why Anubiz Engineering
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