Creating a Resilient Disaster Recovery Plan for Native Cloud Applications: An In-Depth Guide

In today's cloud computing era, ensuring system resilience and recoverability is crucial. As organizations increasingly rely on native cloud applications, a robust Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is essential. This comprehensive guide provides step-by-step instructions to build an effective DRP, explores various cloud disaster recovery options, and shares best practices for incident management.

Key Components of a Disaster Recovery Plan

A concrete System Architecture

Detailed diagrams and descriptions of your cloud application's architecture, including servers, databases, and network configurations.

Choosing the good strategy is always a point of hours of discussions or lectures, keep in mind that there is no reference architecture “ones that never fail”, it is more about balancing the risk of unavailability. Scaleway can help you on your project to choose the tailor-made approach to your project.

The Unsung Heroes : Contact Information and Communication Protocols

A directory of all DRP team members, their roles, and emergency contact details.

A dedicated and well-prepared disaster recovery team is crucial for effectively restoring services and mitigating the impact of disasters.

Essential Roles:

• Team Lead: Oversees DRP activation and coordinates the response.
• System Admins: Tasked with restoring backups and ensuring system integrity.
• Network Engineers: Responsible for securing and restoring network configurations.
• Security Experts: Address and mitigate security breaches.
• Communication Officers: Manage internal and external communications.

Ensure your team is on-call and ready to respond 24/7. Use tools like Splunk to manage on-call rotations and alerting.

Documentation for Backup Solutions

Explicit documentation of backup locations and restoration processes.

Documentation: The Bedrock of Recovery

One of the fundamental pillars of a robust DRP is meticulous documentation and procedures to restore and recover backup. Comprehensive documentation serves as the go-to reference during an emergency, providing clear instructions and ensuring that everyone involved knows their roles and responsibilities.

At Scaleway we understand this, and we work hard to ensure that our users have always updated documentation.

Some conclusions about our researches:

• 84% of users consider product documentation as critical when choosing a cloud provider
• 76% of users consider it important to have case examples (Terraform snippets, API recipes, etc) in the documentation.
• 53% of our users visit the documentation website at least once a week

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule: copy, copy, copy

An effective backup strategy is crucial to any disaster recovery plan. The 3-2-1 rule is a tried-and-true method that ensures data is reliably backed up and accessible in the event of a disaster. The rule is simple:

1. Three Copies of Data: Maintain at least three copies of your data.
2. Two Different Technologies: Store copies on at least two different types of storage media.
3. One Copy Off-Site: Keep at least one copy off-site to protect against local disasters.

In a cloud context, this might involve:

• Snapshot Volume: Regularly take snapshots of your volumes.
• Amazon S3 Export: Export data to Scaleway Object Storage for durable, scalable storage.
• Off-Site Copy: Download the Amazon S3 export or copy it to another region to ensure geographic redundancy.

Important Note: An untested backup is as good as no backup. Regularly test your backups to ensure they can be restored as expected.

Some Testing Procedures:

• Scheduled Drills: Conduct regular drills simulating different disaster scenarios.
• Unannounced Tests: Perform surprise tests to assess real-time readiness.
• Review and Improve: Conduct post-mortems after each test to identify gaps and update the DRP accordingly.

Disaster Recovery Options for Native Cloud Applications

Scaleway provides a range of disaster recovery options designed to meet the specific needs of your applications. Explore popular solutions that can be customized to ensure resilience and reliability for your cloud infrastructure.

Backup and Restore Methods for Data Protection

Overview: Regularly back up data and restore it in case of a disaster.

Pros:

• Cost-Effective: Lower ongoing costs as you only pay for storage and occasional data retrieval.
• Simplicity: Easy to implement and manage, making it suitable for small to medium-sized businesses.

Cons:

• Longer Recovery Time: Can be slow to restore services, leading to extended downtime.
• Potential Data Loss: Risk of data loss between backup intervals, depending on the frequency of backups.

Here the mécanisme how to transfer snapshots in other Availability Zone in the same region:

Here how an architecture can be structured with an external provider:

Pilot Light Cloud Solutions

Overview: Maintain a minimal version of your application always running, which can be scaled up in the event of a disaster.

Pros:

• Faster Recovery: Quicker than a full backup and restore, as core services are already running.
• Cost-Efficient: Lower cost compared to a full standby solution since only essential services are running continuously.

Cons:

• Complexity: Required careful planning to ensure scalability and integration.
• Limited Capacity: initial capacity might be insufficient to handle the increase in load. Can be tricky to handle the performance during the scaling.

Warm Standby

Overview: Keep a scaled-down but fully functional version of your application running in another region.

Pros:

• Reduced Downtime: Faster recovery times with minimal data loss.
• High Availability: Ensures services are running and can quickly scale up.

Cons:

• Higher Cost: More expensive than pilot light due to running a functional environment continuously.
• Resource Management: Requires continuous monitoring to ensure your environment is up-to-date and ready

Multi-Site Active/Active

Overview: Run your application simultaneously in multiple regions, providing immediate failover capability.

Pros:

• Immédiate Failover: Provides the highest availability
• Load Distribution: Balances load across multiple sites, improving performance and resilience

Cons:

• High Cost: Most expensive solution due to the need to maintain multiple active environments and can multiple the egress cost.
• Complexity: Requires sophisticated configuration and synchronization.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Overview: Outsource disaster recovery to a third-party service provider that handles all aspects of the DRP.

Pros:

• Simplified Management: The provider handles the complexity of your DRP.
• Expert Support: Access to specialized expertise and advanced DR technologies.

Cons:

• Dependence on Provider: Reduced control over the events or recovery process.
• Cost: Can be expensive, depending on the SLAs and features offered.

Building a Disaster Recovery Plan is an ongoing process that requires regular updates and improvements. Do not forget the retention, frequency, security, restoring plan but this is subject for my next post. Stay proactive, and your application will remain resilient in the face of the next Black Swan.