Learn how to plan for disaster recovery in infrastructure. Backup strategies, failover procedures, and recovery testing.

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Disaster Recovery Planning: Building Resilient Infrastructure

Disaster recovery ensures business continuity. This guide covers DR planning for infrastructure.

Backup Strategy #

hcl.hcl

# Backup Terraform state
terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket         = "terraform-state"
    key            = "production/terraform.tfstate"
    region         = "us-east-1"
    encrypt        = true
    dynamodb_table = "terraform-locks"
  }
}

Multi-Region Deployment #

hcl.hcl

# Primary region
module "primary" {
  source = "./modules/infrastructure"
  region = "us-east-1"
}

# Secondary region
module "secondary" {
  source = "./modules/infrastructure"
  region = "us-west-2"
}

Failover Procedures #

bash.bash

# Automated failover script
#!/bin/bash
set -e

# Update DNS to secondary region
aws route53 change-resource-record-sets \
  --hosted-zone-id Z123456 \
  --change-batch file://failover.json

# Verify failover
./verify_failover.sh

Recovery Testing #

bash.bash

# Test restore procedure
terraform destroy -target=module.production
terraform apply -target=module.backup

# Verify functionality
./test_restore.sh

Best Practices #

Regular backups
Test restore procedures
Document procedures
Automate where possible
Regular DR drills

Conclusion #

Plan for disasters by backing up state, deploying multi-region, and regularly testing recovery procedures.

For Disaster Recovery Planning: Building Resilient Infrastructure, define pre-deploy checks, rollout gates, and rollback triggers before release. Track p95 latency, error rate, and cost per request for at least 24 hours after deployment. If the trend regresses from baseline, revert quickly and document the decision in the runbook.

Keep the operating model simple under pressure: one owner per change, one decision channel, and clear stop conditions. Review alert quality regularly to remove noise and ensure on-call engineers can distinguish urgent failures from routine variance.

Repeatability is the goal. Convert successful interventions into standard operating procedures and version them in the repository so future responders can execute the same flow without ambiguity.