AWS Disaster Recovery: Pilot Light and Warm Standby, Multisite

Everyone who works in IT knows Murphy’s Law. It states that “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Failure is a part of IT life, regardless of whether it’s hardware failure, human error or system breach. AWS can help minimize downtime.
AWS allows companies to seamlessly move critical operations to the cloud and reduce downtime. We will be discussing four different disaster recovery methods throughout this article. Let’s first discuss RPO and RTO, which are two metrics that can be used to assess the viability of a disaster recovery.
RPO vs. RTO
Amazon outlines four types of disaster recovery (DR), which are Backup and Recovery and Pilot Light, Warm Standby and Multi-Site. It can be difficult to decide when to apply which disaster relief operation. An acceptable RTO or RPO is an acceptable level for business continuity and data recovery.
RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective, and RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. These will be asked of those who are aspiring to become AWS Solutions Architects. An RPO is the best time at which data can be recovered.
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Start training If the business states, “In case of a catastrophe, we would like all data to be recovered as recent as one hour ago.” Your RPO is one hour. Another way to say it is that the business expects to lose all data produced within the last hour but not the minute before.
RTO, on other hand, is the time it should take for the backup systems to become fully functional. Similar to the last example, if the company said that they would tolerate one hour of downtime from the disaster striking until the system’s disaster recovery implementation, that would be an RTO.
As you might expect the RTO and RPO are shorter, the more expensive and complex the backup system will be. Before you decide on the best DR approach, it is important that you conduct a Business Impact Assessment. A Business Impact Analysis is simply an assessment of how important a system is to your business and how it would impact the company.
It should answer questions like how much money you would lose due to downtime, if the company’s reputation would be affected, and how much capital should go into the system’s DR operations.
Once the analysis is complete you will be able determine which solution is best suited for your company. Let’s look at Backup and Restore, the first option.
Backup and Restore
Backup and Restore is the most affordable and cost-effective disaster recovery option. Backup and Restore is the most similar to tape-backed recovery of all possible DR options. The biggest difference is that the data would not be streamed to a tape but instead to an S3 — IA or S3 Glacier bucket. S3 buckets are reliable and can be used in multiple locations. They are built for “eleven 9’s” durability. This means that there is practically no way this data can be recovered.
If the system is affected by this method of DR, then the administrator would need to upload data from the S3 buckets back onto the system. What if your company has tape drives but no data in S3? Amazon Snowball is here to help.
Amazon Snowball is an AWS data transport service. It is a physical hard disk that is connected directly to a company’s database. Once you have uploaded your data (which can be many petabytes), it is shipped.