Disaster Recovery Plan Example Aws

Standard Operating Procedure: Disaster Recovery (DR) via AWS Pilot Light

Document Control Block

• Document ID: SOP-OPS-DR-AWS-001
• Effective Date: 2023-10-27
• Version: 2.1.0
• Review Cadence: Semi-annual (or post-incident)

1. Executive Summary & Purpose

This document defines the recovery protocol for Template Registry infrastructure using the "Pilot Light" strategy on AWS. The objective is to maintain a minimal version of the environment always running in a secondary region (DR Region), allowing for rapid scaling to full production capacity in the event of a primary region (Primary Region) failure.

2. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: All AWS-hosted production services, RDS instances, S3 buckets, and Route53 configurations.
• Prerequisites:
  • Active AWS IAM permissions (AdministratorAccess).
  • Route53 Health Checks configured.
  • AWS CLI v2 installed and configured.
  • Cross-Region replication enabled (S3/RDS).
  • Terraform state stored in a globally accessible, versioned S3 bucket.

3. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI Matrix)

4. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase 1: Incident Verification & Declaration

• Verify health check failure via CloudWatch Alarms.
• Confirm outage scope (e.g., Regional AWS outage vs. local service failure).
• Issue "DR Declaration" to stakeholder distribution list.

Phase 2: Promotion of Pilot Light

• Execute Terraform apply targeting DR region to scale compute groups (ASG) to production capacity.
• Promote RDS Read Replica to standalone master instance in DR region.
• Verify parameter group and security group compatibility in DR region.

Phase 3: Traffic Redirection

• Update Route53 Alias records to point to the DR region Load Balancer (ELB).
• Update TTL to 60s for immediate propagation.
• Verify connectivity via synthetic monitoring endpoints.

Phase 4: Validation & Recovery

• Run automated smoke tests against the DR endpoint.
• Inspect CloudWatch metrics for latency and error rate stabilization.
• Notify stakeholders of successful failover and restoration of service.

5. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• Metric Thresholds:
  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): < 30 minutes.
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): < 5 minutes (based on RDS sync intervals).
• Pro-Tips:
  • Drift Detection: Run terraform plan weekly in the DR region to ensure infrastructure parity.
  • Database Lag: Monitor ReplicaLag CloudWatch metrics; if lag exceeds 300s, trigger alerts before a disaster event.
  • IAM Policy: Ensure DR region IAM roles are mirrors of Primary to prevent "Access Denied" loops during cutover.

6. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why choose Pilot Light over Warm Standby? A: Pilot Light provides the optimal balance between cost-efficiency and recovery speed. We only pay for full production compute capacity during active disaster intervals, whereas Warm Standby keeps production-scale instances running 24/7.

Q: What happens if the RDS promotion fails? A: If the primary-to-DR promotion fails, trigger the "Restore from S3/Snapshots" workflow. Ensure you have PITR (Point-in-Time Recovery) enabled on all databases to minimize data loss.

Q: Are manual DNS changes required? A: No, if Route53 health checks are correctly configured, you may opt for automated failover. However, manual confirmation is required by the Lead Architect to prevent "flapping" during intermittent network brownouts.

Authorized by: Julian Vance, Chief Architect, Template Registry