AWS Disaster Recovery Setup: Pilot Light Strategy 

By Rimpi Mathur, Technical Architect

In today’s fast-moving world full of unforeseen events, it becomes crucial for businesses to bounce back quickly after a failure. It is a good practice to set up a disaster recovery (DR) environment for your business to be back online in minimum time and data loss. Here we discuss how AWS can help you prepare for inevitable risks and reduce loss. 

While setting up DR there are two main objectives: 

  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable downtime. 
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable data loss. 

There are four different strategies provided by AWS, and you can choose the one that best fits your needs. 

  1. Backup and Restore 
  1. Pilot Light 
  1. Warm Standby 
  1. Multi-site 

We are going to set up a multi-region DR environment using Pilot Light strategy. 

The set up includes: 

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) 
  • EC2 instances 
  • Aurora Global database 
  • Elastic cache (Redis) 

In Pilot Light strategy the Aurora global database replicates data from the live region (region 1) to a local read-only cluster in the recovery region (region 2) but the services are idle in region 2. 

Follow These Steps to Recovery

  1. Copy AMIs (Amazon Machine Image) from region 1 to region 2. This helps in creating new instances in region 2 with the latest information on the instance in region 1. 
  2. Confirm hourly backup snapshots of the data have been copied to region 2. 
  3. Spin up new EC2 instances using the AMIs. 
  4. Remove the secondary cluster (region 2) from the Aurora global database, doing so promotes the cluster to full read/write capability. Now, create a new Aurora global database with the newly promoted cluster (region 2) as the primary cluster and add region 1 to the new database. This creates a new secondary cluster at region 1. 
  5. Modify your application to use the newly promoted DB cluster. 
  6. Create a new redis cluster in region 2 and update the redisson.yaml file. 
  7. Verify all connections are working. 
  8. Update Route53 entries – Change A record to point to region 2 load balancer. 

You are live in DR.

Bounce back quickly with a disaster recovery (DR) environment for your business, and ensure minimum time and data loss. If you need assistance with next steps, don’t hesitate to contact us using the form below. Read more AWS Technical Blogs here, and learn about TekStream AWS Services here.