DR Options on AWS

As opposed to traditional infrastructure deployment on-premises, the cloud lets you take a much more dynamic approach to DR. It frees you from the capital investment that you need to make on-premises to provision DR infrastructure. It also makes DR infrastructure readily available for you to speed up recovery; thus, you can focus on designing a solution to meet your RTO and RPO requirements.

Your options to deal with a disaster in AWS can be mapped onto four major DR strategies: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and active-active. The idea in each case is to be able to restore or continue operating your workload in a second Region. The cost and complexity of the various strategies range from lower (backup and restore) to higher (active-active), as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 7.1: DR strategies cost and complexity

The following sections will take you through each strategy in detail.

Backup and Restore

This...