Issue #12: AWS Was Down, How About Your Application?

In the last few days all I could see on LinkedIn was AWS, AWS, AWS… One region goes down, half the world goes down. Everybody talks about what caused it; very few talk about how not to be affected by it. “This incident only shows how reliant on AWS and the cloud companies are!” is what I mostly read. But in between the lines, I’d risk saying that what this incident surfaced was not overreliance on AWS, but rather how unprepared most companies are for this kind of situation. A cloud region is bound to eventually go down, so what matters is how well-prepared you and your systems are to deal with the disruption. Disaster recovery is not straightforward, yes, and the consequence is that it ends up being pushed back as new features (ooh, the new features) take priority. However, those who had an effective, clear, and tested disaster recovery plan were able to respond to the incident systematically and had their systems recover much faster than the AWS region itself.

So in this article, we’re gonna dive deeper into the four main disaster recovery strategies, how they differ from each other, what are the pros and cons of each, the trade-offs between them, and when to use each. It’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started!