Cloud Application Architectures

Chapter 6. Disaster Recovery

How good is your disaster recovery plan? It’s fully documented and you regularly test it by running disaster recovery drills, right?

So far in this book, we have talked about what happens in the event of routine, expected failures. Disaster recovery is the practice of making a system capable of surviving unexpected or extraordinary failures. A disaster recovery plan, for example, will help your IT systems survive a fire in your data center that destroys all of the servers in that data center and the systems they support.

Every organization should have a documented disaster recovery process and should test that process at least twice each year. In reality, even well-disciplined companies tend to fall short in their disaster recovery planning. Too many small- and medium-size businesses would simply go out of business in the case of the data center fire scenario I just outlined.

One of the things I personally love about virtualization is the way it lets you automate disaster recovery. Recovery from trivial failures and disaster recovery in the cloud become largely indistinguishable operations. As a result, if your entire cloud infrastructure falls apart, you should have the capabilities in place to restore it on internal servers, at a managed hosting services provider, or at another cloud provider in minutes or hours.