Disaster Recovery Concepts

A disaster recovery (DR) solution enables you to fail over quickly from natural or human-made disasters and provide business continuity in your secondary region. In addition, you can use the DR setup for planned migrations and switch between different regions periodically.

Before you set up any DR solution, understand the following:

• Determine the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for your service. The RTO is the target time within which your service must be restored after a disaster occurs. The RPO is the period after a disaster occurs during which the service can tolerate lost data before the disaster begins to affect the business.
• The DR solution described in this guide replicates only design-time artifacts; therefore, the RPO is not applicable in this scenario. You can measure the RTO based on how quickly you’re able to complete the failover tasks in the secondary region.
• This DR solution only supports an active-passive configuration. Only one instance or region of the DR configuration can be active and processing transactions at a time. Other details on the scope and constraints of the solution are provided in the following sections.