Example of Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Standard Operating Procedure: Enterprise Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) Execution

Template Registry Engineering Division

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1. Document Control Block

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2. Executive Summary & Purpose

This Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) defines the mandatory, repeatable engineering workflows required to execute the Template Registry Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). The objective is to ensure business continuity, data integrity, and rapid restoration of core infrastructure and registry services in the event of a catastrophic regional outage, infrastructure compromise, or unrecoverable data corruption event. Adherence to this protocol minimizes Recovery Time Objectives (RTO < 4 hours) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO < 15 minutes) across all production environments.

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3. Scope & Prerequisites

Scope

This procedure applies to all cloud-hosted infrastructure, containerized microservices, persistent storage volumes, and managed database instances residing within the primary production deployment region (us-east-1).

Prerequisites & Required Access

• Infrastructure Access: AWS Administrator IAM role, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enabled.
• Cluster Access: cluster-admin RBAC permissions via kubectl for all target Kubernetes clusters.
• Secrets Management: Break-glass access token for HashiCorp Vault / AWS Secrets Manager.
• Communication Channels: Designated PagerDuty escalation policy and access to the #incident-command Slack channel.
• Tooling:
  • Terraform v1.5+
  • Helm v3.12+
  • AWS CLI v2.x
  • Velero CLI (for Kubernetes cluster state restoration)

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4. Roles & Responsibilities

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5. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase 1: Incident Assessment & Activation

• 1.1 Confirm primary region failure via automated telemetry alerts or explicit declaration by the Incident Commander.
• 1.2 Convene the Disaster Recovery Response Team in the designated bridge (zoom.us/j/template-registry-dr).
• 1.3 Post status update to the internal status page: "Primary region operating under degraded state; DRP activation initiated."
• 1.4 Authorize execution of the secondary region (us-west-2) bootstrap via Terraform.

Phase 2: Infrastructure Provisioning (Secondary Region)

• 2.1 Authenticate against the cloud provider using break-glass administrative credentials.
• 2.2 Navigate to the infrastructure orchestration repository directory:

  cd /infra/terraform/environments/dr-secondary
  

• 2.3 Initialize Terraform workspace and verify state lock:

  terraform init -backend-config="region=us-west-2"
  

• 2.4 Execute infrastructure provisioning plan for compute, networking, and load balancers:

  terraform apply -auto-approve -target=module.core_infrastructure
  

• 2.5 Verify networking and DNS resolution pathways are routing health check probes successfully.

Phase 3: Data Store Restoration

• 3.1 Locate the latest valid automated database snapshot ARN in the primary replication bucket.
• 3.2 Initiate Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) for the primary PostgreSQL cluster in the secondary region:

  aws rds restore-db-instance-to-point-in-time \
    --source-db-instance-identifier template-registry-prod \
    --target-db-instance-identifier template-registry-dr \
    --restore-time $(date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ") \
    --db-subnet-group-name dr-db-subnet \
    --region us-west-2
  

• 3.3 Monitor restoration progress until status reads available:

  aws rds wait db-instance-available --db-instance-identifier template-registry-dr --region us-west-2
  

• 3.4 Execute database migration validation scripts to ensure schema parity:

  npm run db:validate --env=dr
  

Phase 4: Application Deployment & Cluster State Recovery

• 4.1 Connect to the secondary Kubernetes cluster:

  aws eks update-kubeconfig --name template-registry-dr-cluster --region us-west-2
  

• 4.2 Restore persistent volume states and cluster configurations using Velero:

  velero restore create --from-backup latest-prod-backup --include-namespaces template-registry-prod
  

• 4.3 Deploy core microservices via Helm using the production overrides file:

  helm upgrade --install template-registry ./charts/template-registry \
    --namespace production \
    --values ./charts/template-registry/values-dr.yaml
  

• 4.4 Verify pod health, readiness probes, and liveness checks:

  kubectl get pods -n production --watch
  

Phase 5: Traffic Routing & Validation

• 5.1 Update Route53 / DNS global traffic management weights to direct 100% of client traffic to the secondary region endpoint.
• 5.2 Execute synthetic transaction checks against the restored public API:

  newman run ./tests/postman/dr-smoke-test-collection.json
  

• 5.3 Confirm error rates (5xx) remain below the 0.01% threshold for 15 consecutive minutes.
• 5.4 Issue final incident resolution notice and transition to post-mortem tracking.

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6. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

Best Practices

• Immutable Infrastructure: Do not attempt in-place repairs of corrupted primary nodes during a live event; always provision clean environments via infrastructure-as-code (IaC).
• Secret Hygiene: Ensure dynamic secrets engines (Vault) are unsealed immediately following Phase 4 application deployment.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

• Split-Brain Scenarios: Ensure primary region networking is hard-blocked via security groups before activating write operations in the secondary region.
• Stale DNS Caching: Avoid relying on local DNS propagation checks; use public resolvers (8.8.8.8 / 1.1.1.1) to verify global routing updates.

Metric Thresholds

• Maximum Allowable RTO: 240 Minutes (4 Hours)
• Maximum Allowable RPO: 15 Minutes
• Target API Availability Post-Failover: $\ge 99.9%$

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7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What should be done if the automated database PITR fails due to a snapshot checksum error?
A: Immediately abort the automated restoration pipeline. Escalate to the DBA Lead to fall back to the cold storage snapshot taken at 00:00 UTC, accepting data loss up to that timestamp in accordance with the RPO exception protocol.

Q2: Can we perform a partial failover of specific microservices while keeping others in the degraded primary region?
A: No. The Template Registry architecture is tightly coupled around a centralized transactional state. Partial failovers introduce data race conditions and are strictly prohibited by system design.

Q3: Who holds the authority to revert the DNS routing back to the primary region once it recovers?
A: Only the Incident Commander, in direct consultation with the Chief Architect, may authorize the reverse failover procedure, which must be executed during a scheduled maintenance window.