Warm Standby DR Setup
Warm standby is the sweet spot between cost and recovery speed. A reduced-capacity copy of your production environment runs continuously in a secondary region, with data replication keeping it current. When the primary fails, you scale up and cut over in minutes — not hours.
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Secondary Environment Architecture
The warm standby environment mirrors production architecture at reduced scale — smaller instance types, fewer replicas, lower autoscaling limits. Database read replicas run in the secondary region with continuous replication. Application servers are deployed with the same version as production but minimum instance count. The environment costs 15-30% of production but can scale to full capacity in under 10 minutes.
Continuous Data Replication
Databases use asynchronous cross-region replication — PostgreSQL streaming replication, Aurora Global Database, or RDS Cross-Region Read Replicas. Object storage uses S3 Cross-Region Replication with RTC (Replication Time Control) for 15-minute SLA. Cache layers (Redis, ElastiCache) are pre-warmed with critical data. Replication lag is monitored continuously with alerts at RPO threshold.
Failover Procedure
Failover is semi-automated: health checks detect the failure, alerts notify the on-call engineer, and a single command initiates the failover sequence. The sequence: promote the database replica to primary, scale up application instances, update DNS records, and verify health checks pass. Total failover time target: under 15 minutes. The procedure is documented step-by-step with expected outputs and rollback instructions.
Cost Optimization
We optimize warm standby costs without compromising recovery capability. Application servers run on Reserved Instances or Savings Plans at minimum scale. Database replicas use the smallest viable instance type (can be scaled up during failover). We use On-Demand or spot instances only during scale-up. Monthly warm standby cost for a typical SaaS stack: $200-800, depending on database size and replication requirements.
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