Unexpected events, like an outage or cyberattack, can happen to any organization, at any time, and in any place. When something like this happens, organizations must be able to ensure business continuity and minimize the probability (and impact) of downtime.
Organizations using the AWS cloud must embrace different strategies to implement disaster recovery and high-availability solutions.
How AWS facilitates high availability
Every business is required to run operations in a continuous manner. For workloads that run in the AWS cloud, it is important for businesses to endure database and application outages. Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilitates disaster recovery and high availability in several different ways.
- AWS offers reliable, secure, and scalable storage resources, designed for extremely high durability and multi-availability zone resiliency, enabling organizations to efficiently store, access, and protect business data.
- Several data protection policies lie at the foundation of AWS that provide organizations with the technical, operational, and contractual measures needed to protect their data.
- Flexible replication tools boost availability, enhance performance, and limit the far-reaching consequences of downtime.
- Multiple availability zones provide separate failover domains, offering the ability to isolate faults or issues and maintain the availability of instances.
Top 10 strategies for implementing DR solutions
If you want to implement disaster recovery and high-availability solutions using AWS, you must embrace different strategies. An AWS Managed Services Partner can help implement the right strategies. Let’s look at the top 10:
- Ensure a backup strategy that runs continuously
The first step to implementing disaster recovery and high-availability solutions using AWS is to ensure a backup strategy that runs continuously. How frequently you run your backup plays a huge role in determining your achievable recovery point. For instance, for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), you can use Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to asynchronously copy objects to an S3 bucket in the DR region continuously.
- Take a multipronged approach to backup and recovery
Despite the rarity of AWS services going completely offline, it pays to take a multi-pronged approach to backup and recovery. From ensuring the appropriate level of granularity to meet the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) to accounting for special cases such as very large databases on a case-by-case basis – in the event of a disaster, such an approach can ensure redundancy and minimize data loss.
- Always deploy IaC using AWS CloudFormation or the AWS Cloud Development Kit
Deploying infrastructure quickly without errors doesn’t come easy. Services such as AWS CloudFormation or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) can help restore workloads in the recovery Region. While AWS CloudFormation can help speed up cloud provisioning with IaC, AWS CDK can help define cloud application resources using familiar programming languages – thus minimizing recovery times.
- Ensure continuous replication via AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
If you want to enable application recovery on AWS in a scalable and cost-effective manner, you must embrace AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS). AWS DRS allows for continuous replication of server-hosted applications and server-hosted databases from any source into AWS using block-level replication. You can use a Region in the AWS Cloud as a disaster recovery target for any workload hosted on-premises or on another cloud. When a failover event is triggered, staged resources can automatically create a full-capacity deployment in the target Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that is used as a staging area.
- Backup all code and configurations using AWS CodePipeline
Automating release pipelines is another compelling way to ensure high availability on AWS. AWS CodePipeline allows you to back up all your code and configurations – without errors. It also enables you to enable fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. Using AWS CodePipeline, you can define your pipeline structure, receive notifications through continuous monitoring, and rapidly release new features to adapt to evolving needs.
- Capitalize on various AWS availability zones
Opting to run your workloads in different availability zones is a practical solution to ensuring disaster recovery and high availability. AWS Availability Zones are designed to provide separate failure domains while keeping workloads nearby for low-latency communications. They ensure synchronous replication of databases using mirroring, always on availability groups, basic availability groups, or failover cluster instances.
- Embrace the fully managed AWS Backup Service
Constantly backing up workloads to maintain high availability levels can get challenging for complex use cases. To ensure continuous backup and recovery, you can leverage the capabilities of the fully-managed AWS Backup Service. AWS Backup centrally manages and automates data protection, protecting you against accidental or malicious incidents. As a policy-based service, it configures, manages, and governs backup activity across AWS accounts, resources, and regions while examining them against necessary policies to ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements.
- Leverage the AWS Resilience Hub to validate workloads
Just setting up a DR strategy is not enough. You must also regularly assess and test it, so you can confidently invoke it, whenever necessary. Using the AWS Resilience Hub, you can continuously validate and track the resilience of your AWS workloads. It also indicates if you are likely to meet your RTO and RPO targets while empowering you to take the necessary steps to protect your applications from disruptions.
- Enable robust object versioning
Another strategy you can adopt to protect your AWS data is object versioning. S3 object versioning, for instance, protects your S3 data from the consequences of human error. By retaining the original version before accidental deletion or modification, it curtails the consequences of a disaster. For example, if you delete an object, S3 will add a delete marker in the source bucket, thus protecting data in the DR Region from malicious deletions in the source Region.
- Minimize DR costs by taking a pilot-light approach
DR strategies aren’t just about replicating workloads; they’re about replicating workloads in a cost-effective manner. A pilot right approach can allow you to replicate data from one Region to another and provision a copy of your core workload infrastructure. While resources required to support data replication and backup are always on, other elements, such as application servers are switched off and used only when DR failover is invoked. By minimizing active resources, such an approach limits the ongoing cost of disaster recovery while simplifying recovery because the core infrastructure requirements are all in place.
Running and maintaining workloads and applications on AWS demands a robust DR and high-availability strategy. If you want to carry out these steps and boost the performance and scalability of your AWS workloads, we can help!
As a leading AWS partner in India, we can empower your business with the right replication, high availability, and security tools and approaches.
Elevate your DR stance with enreap today!
