AWS Disaster Recovery part 3

AWS Architecture Blog | Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part III: Pilot Light and Warm Standby
Feb 20, 2024
AWS Disaster Recovery part 3

Introduce

This post is a standby for the following articles

Prerequisites

This post is next version of previous post.

Pilot Light or Warm Standby

When choosing a DR strategy, you need to consider whether focus on the benefits of lower RTO and RPO versus the costs of implementing and operating a strategy.

The Pilot Light and Warm standby strategies both offer a good balance of benefits and cost.

WE covered the basics in AWS Disaster Recovery Part 1

Similarities between Pilot Light and Warm Standby

Both strategies might replicate data from the primary Region to data resources in the recovery Region, such as Amazon RDS or Amazon DynamoDB

As require for all active/passive strategies, both require a means to route traffic to the primary Region, and then fail over to the Region when covering from disaster

Differences between Pilot Light and Warm Standby

The primary difference between two strategies is infrastructure deployment and readiness. The warm standby strategy deploys a functional stack, but at reduced capacity.

Warm Standby prepare more smaller resources than Origin Infra. So, Warm Standby can't handle production levels of traffic. But Warn Standby's RTO is more shortest than Pilot Light. Because Warm Standby prepare more smaller resources than Pilot Light.


Pilot Light must prepare all resources to recover. Therefore, Pilot Light's RTO is more longest than Warm Standby.

Conclusion

In case of DR, both Pilot Light and Warm Standby offer the capability to limit data loss (RPO). Both offer sufficient RTO performance that enables you to limit downtime. Between these two strategies, you have a choice of optimizing for RTO or for cost.

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