Creating a aws disaster recovery services plan and implementing it in advance minimizes the impact of unexpected events, outages, and attacks. Backups are essential to any disaster recovery strategy.
Establish recovery objectives based on RTO and RPO metrics. Consider geographical redundancy in multiple regions and Availability Zones, storage-level replication, and failover techniques such as Route 53 DNS failover. Leverage tools that enable automation to reduce human error and increase consistency in DR processes.
Backup and Restore
Backup and restore is a simple recovery option on AWS that offers low RPO (recovery point objective) and a fast RTO (recovery time objective). This solution uses continuous data replication to back up application servers. This data is then stored in multiple AWS Regions. This minimizes downtime and allows the company to quickly recover the data from the backup server.
During this recovery process, IT staff will restore the data from backup and then deploy it in a recovery Region. This can be facilitated by using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services like AWS Cloud Development Kit and AWS CloudFormation.
A disaster can be caused by natural reasons like earthquakes or fire, or technical reasons such as power failures and network connectivity issues. These disasters may lead to a loss of a single physical data center or a complete Region. Therefore, you should consider the RPO and RTO of each workload when determining which recovery strategy is appropriate for it.
Multi-site Deployment
AWS provides a number of disaster recovery (DR) services that can help protect your organization from disruptions. These include backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active/active. The latter strategy maintains a full secondary production system in the cloud and can assume production traffic in the event of an outage at your primary site.
Multisite deployment enables you to deploy a single application across multiple data centers. This reduces network latency and increases availability. To deploy a multisite deployment, you must have the proper connectivity between your sites. Then, you must create a stretched NSX cluster with the correct failure domains and bridge domains.
Multi-Site Deployment enables you to use an NSX cluster in one site to manage networking for two or more ACI sites. This is an advanced pattern that uses two or more ACI fabrics managed by a single APIC cluster. When properly configured, a multisite deployment can provide high-speed inter-data center communication.
Failover
While cloud computing is a great way to modernize IT, no system is invulnerable to disaster events. Whether it’s an earthquake, power outage, or human error, data loss is still possible and must be addressed with a targeted, well-tested disaster recovery plan.
There are several different DR strategies that can be deployed for AWS workloads. The most common is backup and restore, which involves creating backups and restoring them during a failover event. This approach is inexpensive but can result in long recovery times. Other options include a pilot light, warm standby, or multi-site active/active strategy, which offer more reliable but more expensive alternatives.
Uturn’s DR Quickstart helps you create a disaster recovery solution that meets your business needs and budget. Our team can help you assess your RTOs and RPOs to select the best strategy for your environment, and then deploy and test it in a production-like setting. This ensures that your business can resume operations quickly in the event of a disaster, without compromising performance.
Replication
Identify your Recovery Objectives: Understand the applications that must be up and running as quickly as possible. Leverage the AWS Cloud Formation service to build a scalable environment for business-critical data and application services, or use Amazon EC2 to replicate on-premise servers to the AWS cloud.
Back up and restore your data: Leverage the AWS Storage Gateway or Amazon EC2 Backup Service to backup your on-premises and other cloud infrastructure to an Amazon S3 bucket. Amazon S3 offers a variety of data retrieval options, from standard to expedited, depending on your RPO.
Pilot light method: The pilot light approach to disaster recovery is a data replication strategy that allows you to run core infrastructural services in a backup location in standby mode. This technique significantly reduces the RPO and RTO and provides a higher degree of availability for applications that must be up and running immediately. This strategy also uses AWS Cloud Formation and Amazon EC2 Import/Export to automate and streamline the provisioning of services.