Failure Management

Should you remember only one thing from this chapter, it is this: “Everything will eventually fail over time,” (Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com). Failures are a given and it is better to not be under the illusion that they can be prevented forever, however good your design may be.

Backing Up Data

This is another thing that seems obvious but that is often overlooked; backing up data is paramount, and making sure you can recover with your backup data is even more important. This section will only briefly discuss backups as in Chapter 7, Ensuring Business Continuity, will dive deeper into defining a backup strategy.

So, you want to back up your data, your workload configuration, and everything you need to meet the specific business requirements of your workload. Two requirements, in particular, will define your backup strategy: recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). In some cases, you may not even need a backup. Can...