Compute Selection Start by reviewing the available choices for compute resources on AWS. They fall under three subcategories: virtual instances with Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), containers with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and functions with AWS Lambda. The following sections discuss each of them. EC2 Instances With Amazon […]

Principle #4 – Experiment More Often On AWS, you have instant access to all these advanced, serverless, and many other services. Therefore, you should feel encouraged to experiment with them, either to validate a concept or simply to test different configurations (compute, storage, and others) until you find the one that helps your solution deliver […]

Summary In this chapter, you learned the main differences between High Availability and Disaster Recovery. You reviewed how to prepare for a disaster and which major strategies are available in the cloud. You also went through the various AWS services that can support each of these strategies. Finally, this chapter emphasized the importance of testing […]

Detecting a Disaster and Testing DR The first step, before you can take any countermeasures, is to detect that a disaster is actually taking place. Your recovery objectives (RTO and RPO) will dictate how much time you actually have to do so. Consider a situation where you have an RTO of 4 hours with an […]

Warm Standby The warm standby approach goes a step further compared to the pilot light one. It extends the same concept but also maintains a running copy, although scaled down, of your workload. So, your service is already up and running, and the only thing you need is to scale up the compute resources required […]

AWS Services for a Pilot Light Approach On top of the backup services already mentioned in the backup and recovery approach, you now have to consider services that can offer continuous replication, in particular, if you need to satisfy a lower RPO. S3 provides automatic cross-region replication natively. Combined with bucket versioning, it also gives […]

Backup Frequency How can you determine the optimal backup frequency? Provided that backup and restore can satisfy your RTO, the optimal backup frequency is the one that allows you to satisfy your RPO. The RPO will define how much data you are allowed to lose in case of a disaster. So, you need to make […]

Identifying and Backing Up the Necessary Data On AWS, Amazon S3 is the backup destination of choice. It is a very reliable and highly durable storage option. It is extremely cost-efficient and also offers built-in life cycle management to transition your backup data through various and less expensive storage tiers as it ages. In addition, […]

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 […]

Establishing a Business Continuity Plan It may sound obvious, but every measure you take to protect your workload against a disaster should be carefully considered and planned accordingly. First, these measures will have a significant impact on your solution design. Second, the cost of your solution will increase with the degree of protection against a […]